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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 




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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



BY 
BRAND WHITLOCK 



ILLUSTRATED 




BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

MCMXVI 






Copyright, 1909, 1916 

By small, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

(incorpobated) 



M'A ^.^ 'i-'' 



JAN i8!3l7 



llrittttra 
B. J. PAXXHII.L & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 



TO 
E L B. 



PREFACE 

To compress between the covers of a little 
booh like this the whole story of Abraham 
Lincoln, to present within such limitations a 
life so epical, a character so original and yet so 
universal, is obviously impossible. It would be 
impossible, indeed, in a work of a score of 
volumes. The fascinating subject has already 
yielded a whole literature. In the List of Lin- 
colniana in the Library of Congress, compiled 
by Mr, George Thomas Ritchie, there are al- 
ready a thousand titles. Almost any phase of 
Lincoln's remarkable personality is worth a 
volume by itself, Mr, Hill, for instance, has 
written a charming book on ^'Lincoln the Law- 
yer/' devoted in the main to what, in many re- 
spects, is the most interesting period of his life; 
namely, those years when he was on the old 
Eighth Circuit, Mr, Bates's reminiscences of 

9 



PREFACE 

''Lincoln in the Telegraph Office'' are most 
delightful. The student mil wish to read 
Herndon's racy pages, — though he would bet- 
ter take some of them with a grain of salt, — for 
these supply the biographers with all that is 
known of the early life of the subject. He will 
wish, too, to read Lamon, who used Herndon's 
materials; he will wish to peruse the pious pages 
of Holland; and he will find valuable the data 
which but for Miss Tarbell might otherwise 
have been lost. He will find Nicolay and 
Hay's monumental work authoritative, if not 
definitive; and he will not like to miss the fine 
flavor of that latest volume, so sympathetic, so 
full of insight, that has come to us from over 
the sea in Mr, Binns's most excellent Life, He 
will wish to read, also, the intimate personal 
sketches Walt Whitman has scattered all 
through his prose; and above all, of course, he 
will wish to read Lincoln's speeches, letters, 
messages, and State papers, where, better than 
any other words can give it, is to be found the 
expression of his noble personality, 

10 



PREFACE 

To all these works, to all those cited in the 
Bibliography, the present writer owes, and 
wishes to express, his gratitude and acknowl- 
edgments. All he knows, aside from some 
personal recollections of Springfield friends, he 
got from them. He makes no claim of original 
research or new material: he has contributed 
nothing of his own save the labour of condensa- 
tion and a love of the subject which finds it hard 
to resist the temptation to write at as great a 
length as any of them. He would, however, 
urge the reader to get the other books about the 
greatest American, and to seek out for himself 
the secret that was in his wonderful and beauti- 
ful life, — the secret that, let us hope, was re- 
vealed to America for the saving of the world. 

Brand Whitlock. 
Toledo, October 20, 1908 



11 



CHRONOLOGY 

1809 
February 12. Abraham Lincoln was born on the 
Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin, now 
LaRue County, Kentucky. 

1816 
Removed with his parents to Indiana, settling on 
Little Pigeon Creek, near Gentryville, Spencer 
County. 

1818 
Nancy Hanks Lincoln, his mother, died. 

1819 
His father married Sarah Bush Johnston. 

1828 
Went to New Orleans on a flatboat. 

1830 
The Lincolns went to Illinois, settling near Decatur, 

Macon County. 
Abraham split the historic rails, 

15 



CHRONOLOGY 

1831 
Went to New Orleans on a flatboat. 
July, Went to New Salem, Sangamon County. 
Clerk in store. 

1832 
March, Announced himself candidate for legisla- 
ture. 
Captain in Black Hawk War. 
July, Mustered out. 
August, Defeated for election, 

1833 
Engaged in business with Berry. Began to study 

law. 
The firm of Lincoln & Berry failed. 
May, Postmaster of New Salem. Deputy surveyor 

of Sangamon County. 

1834 
Again candidate for legislature, and elected. 

1835 
Was at Vandalia as member of legislature. Met 

Stephen A. Douglas. 
Fell in love with Anne Rutledge, who died. Was 

plunged into melancholia. 



16 



CHRONOLOGY 

1836 

Love affair with Mary Owens. 

Re-elected to legislature. Leader of "Long Nine." 
Worked for Internal Improvement bubble, and 
succeeded in having State capital removed to 
Springfield. 

Protested against resolutions condemning abolition- 
ism. 

Admitted to the bar. 

1837 
Settled in Springfield, forming partnership with 
John T. Stuart. 

1838 
Re-elected to legislature. Minority candidate for 
Speaker. 

1840 
Candidate for Presidential elector on Whig ticket. 
Stumped the State for Harrison. Had encoun- 
ters with Douglas. 
Re-elected to legislature, and again minority candi- 
date for Speaker. 

1841 
He and Douglas rivals for hand of Mary Todd. 
Engagement with Mary Todd broken. Ill and al- 
most deranged. Visited his friend Joshua Speed 
in Kentucky. 
Challenged to a duel by James T. Shields. 

17 



CHRONOLOGY 

April 14. Formed law partnership with Judge Ste- 
phen T. Logan. 
Refused Whig nomination for governor. 

1842 
Novemher 4. Married to Mary Todd. 

1843 
September 20. Formed law partnership with Wil- 
liam H. Herndon. 

1844 
Candidate for Presidential elector on Whig ticket, 
and stumped Illinois and Indiana for Henry Clay. 

1846 
Elected to the Thirtieth Congress over Peter Cart- 
wright. 

1847 
In Congress. Introduced famous *^Spot" Resolu- 
tions. 

1848 
Presidential elector on Whig ticket, and stumped 

New England for Taylor. 
December, Attended second session of the Thirtieth 
Congress. Voted for Wilmot Proviso and Ash- 
mun's amendment. 
Introduced bill abolishing slavery in District of Co- 
lumbia. 

18 



CHRONOLOGY 

Sought appointment as commissioner of General 
Lands Office, and failed. 

Declined appointment as Territorial Governor of 
Oregon. 

Went back to Springfield, disappointed and disillu- 
sioned. 

1849 

Practised law on old Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illi- 
nois. 

1852 

Campaigned for Scott. 

1854 
Roused by repeal of Missouri Compromise and pas- 
sage of Kansas-Nebraska bill. 
Attacked Douglas's position. 
Novemher, Elected to legislature against his will. 

1855 
January. Resigned from legislature to become can- 
didate for United States senator. 
February. Defeated for United States senator. 

1856 

May 29. Spoke at Bloomington Convention, which 
organised the Republican party in Illinois. 

Received 110 votes for Vice-President in Republican 
Convention at Philadelphia. 
19 



CHRONOLOGY 

Candidate for Presidential elector on Republican 

ticket, and campaigned for Fremont. 
Attacked Douglas's position. 

1858 
June 16. Nominated for United States Senate by 

Republicans in State Convention. 
July 24. Challenged Douglas to joint debate. 
Great debate with Douglas. 
Carried Illinois for Republicans on popular vote, but 

lost a majority of the legislative districts. 

1859 
January, Defeated for Senate by Douglas before 

legislature. 
Spoke that fall in Ohio, and in December in Kansas. 

1860 
February 27. Delivered notable address at Cooper 

Institute, New York. 
Spoke also in New England. 
May 9. Named by Illinois Convention at Decatur 

as "Rail" candidate for President. 
May 16. Nominated for President by Republicans 

at Chicago. 
Nommher, Elected. 

1861 
February 11. Left Springfield for Washington. 
March 4. Inaugurated as President. 

20 



CHRONOLOGY 

April 13. Fall of Fort Sumter. 

April 15. Issued call for volunteers, and convened 
Congress in extraordinary session for July 4. 

J% 21. Battle of Bull Run. 

July 25. Appointed McClellan to command Army 
of Potomac. 

November 1. Appointed McClellan commander-in- 
chief, under the President, of all armies. 

December 3. Message to Congress. 

December 25. Ordered the return of Mason and Sli- 
dell, captured Commissioners of the Confederacy, 
and averted war with England. 

1862 

January 13. Appointed Edwin M. Stanton Secre- 
tary of War. 

Sent special message to Congress, recommending 
gradual compensated emancipation of slaves. 

July 11. Appointed Halleck general-in-chief. 

September 22. Issued preliminary proclamation of 
emancipation after battle of Antietaip. 

December, Message to Congress again urging 
gradual compensated emancipation. 

Superseded McClellan in command of Army of the 
Potomac by Burnside. 

December 13. Burnside defeated at Fredericksburg. 

1863 
January 1. Issued Emancipation Proclamation. 

21 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

January 26. Appointed Hooker to succeed Burn- 
side. 

May 2. Hooker lost battle of Chancellorsville. 

June 27. Appointed Meade to succeed Hooker. 

July 1-4. Battle of Gettysburg. 

July 4. Fall of Vicksburg. 

September 19-20. Battle of Chickamauga. 

November 19. Delivered address at dedication of 
the National Cemetery on the battlefield of Gettys- 
burg. 

November 24-25. Grant won battles of Lookout 
Mountain and Missionary Ridge. 

December 8. Message to Congress and Proclama- 
tion of Amnesty. 

1864 
March 3. Commissioned Grant lieutenant-general 

and placed him in command of all the armies. 
June 7. Renominated for President by Republican 

National Convention at Baltimore. 
August 23. Had premonition of defeat. 
November 8. Re-elected. 

1865 
February 1, Hampton Roads Peace Conference 

with Confederate Commissioners. 
March 4. Inaugurated as President a second time. 
March 22. Visited Grant at City Point. 

22 



CHRONOLOGY 

April 4. Entered Richmond. 

April 14. Shot in Ford's Theatre at lO.SO o'clock 

in the evening. 
April 15. Died at 7.22 o'clock in the morning. 
Mat/ 4. Buried in Springfield. 



23 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



The story of Lincoln, perfect in its unities, 
appealing to the imagination like some old 
tragedy, has been told over and over, and will 
be told over and over again. The log cabin 
where he was born, the axe he swung in the 
backwoods, the long sweep to which he bent on 
the flatboat in the river, the pine knot at mid- 
night, — these are the rough symbols of the 
forces by which he made his own slow way. 
Surveyor and legislator, country lawyer riding 
the circuit, politician on the stump and in Con- 
gress, the unwearied rival of Douglas, finally, 
as the lucky choice of a new party, the Presi- 
dent, — the story is wholly typical of these 
States in that earlier epoch when the like was 
possible to any boy. But the story does not 

27 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

end here. He is in the White House at last, 
but in an hour when reahsed ambitions turn to 
ashes, the nation is divided, a crisis confronts 
the land, and menaces the old cause of liberty. 
We see him become the wise leader of that old 
cause, the sad, gentle captain of a mighty war, 
the liberator of a whole race, and not only the 
saviour of a republic, but the creator of a na- 
tion ; and then, in the very hour of triumph, — 
the tragedy for which destiny plainly marked 
him. Rightly told, the story is the epic of 
America. 

It was like him to have little interest in his 
forbears. In the brief autobiographical notes 
of 1859 he mentioned the Lincolns of Massa- 
chusetts, but he did not know that with them he 
was descended from those Lincolns who came 
from England about 1635. The genealogists 
trace the line down to that Abraham who, in 
Kentucky in 1788, was killed by the Indians. 
The tragedy separated the family. Thomas, 
the youngest son, was only ten. He did not 

28 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

even know how to read. He worked as he 
could, became a carpenter, and in 1806 married 
his cousin, Nancy Hanks, whose pathetic 
young figure has emerged from mystery as the 
daughter of Joseph Hanks and his Quaker 
wife, Nannie Shipley, whose sister Mary was 
Thomas Lincoln's mother. 

At Elizabethtown a daughter was born. 
Then they moved to a farm on the Big South 
Fork of Nolin Creek, three miles from 
Hodgensville, in what was then Hardin, now 
LaRue, County. And here in a cabin, on 
February 12, 1809, their second child was born. 
They named him Abraham, after old Abraham, 
his grandfather, who had been killed by the In- 
dians. When he was four years old, his father 
removed to Knob Creek, then, in 1816, aban- 
doned his clearing, and went to Indiana. He 
staked off a claim on Pigeon Creek, near Gen- 
tryville, Spencer County, and built a "half- 
faced camp" of unhewn logs, without floor, en- 
closed on three sides, the open front protected 
only by skins. Here they lived for a whole 

29 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

year. Then Thomas and Betsy Sparrow came, 
and Dennis Hanks, and they reared a log 
cabin. The life was hard, but Abraham could 
play and sometimes hunt with his cousin Den- 
nis, though he was too tenderhearted to kill, 
and after one day shooting a wild turkey, he 
never afterward, as he was able to record in 
1860, "pulled the trigger on any larger game." 
Despite the abounding game, however, the fare 
was poor; and one day, after the "blessing" had 
been said over the monotonous potatoes, the boy 
looked up with that expression which in later 
years foretold a joke, and said, "I call these 
mighty poor blessings." 

In 1818 the settlement was swept by the 
dreaded "milk-sick." Thomas and Betsy 
Sparrow died of it; then Thomas Lincoln's 
wife fell ill. She lived a week, and, calling the 
children to her bed of skins and leaves, she told 
them "to love their kindred and worship God," 
and so died. There were no ceremonies at this 
most miserable funeral, and the winter that 
came upon the grave in the forest, where 

30 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Thomas Lincoln laid his wife in the rude coffin 
he had made, beat on a desolate home. The 
motherless childixn shivered in a cabin without 
a floor, and the sorrow of it all, the mystery of 
death, the loneliness of the woods, made a dark 
impression on the sensitive boy. 

But back in Kentucky there was a widow, 
Sarah Buck Johnston, once a sweetheart of 
Thomas Lincoln. He went to court her, and 
in December, 1819, they were married. Her 
household goods— among them "a M^alnut bu- 
reau valued at fifty dollars"— improved the 
cabin, and the family, augmented by her three 
children, began life anew. This motherly 
housewife dressed the forlorn little Lincolns in 
her own children's clothes, and for the first time 
they knew the luxury of a feather bed. And, 
best miracle of all, she inspired Thomas to lay 
a floor, mend doors, cut windows, and plaster 
the chinks in the cabin walls. She had what 
poor Nancy Hanks had lacked,— the robust 
strength for rude labour. She was a "very tall 
woman, straight as an Indian, of fair complex- 

31 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ion, . . . handsome, sprightly, talkative and 
proud." And between her and the young Ab- 
raham there grew a love which was to last all 
his life : she said he was the best son woman ever 
had. Thomas Lincoln had little patience with 
*'book learning," and, failing to interest Abra- 
ham in carpentry, hired him out to neighbours. 
He went to school, as he said, "by littles," — 
scarcely a year in all; but he learned "reading, 
writing and ciphering to the Rule o' Three," 
became an excellent penman, and, it is said, 
corrected the spelling and the pronunciation of 
the family name, which in the settlement was 
"Linkhern" or "Linkhorn." The new mother 
encouraged him to study at home, and he read 
"every book he heard of within a circuit of fifty 
miles," — Murray's English Reader, the Bible, 
iEsop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, The Pil- 
grimfs Progress, a History of the United 
States, and Weems's Life of Washington, 
This last book he had borrowed of Josiah Craw- 
ford, and one night, through carelessness, it 
was stained and warped by rain. Crawford 

32 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

made him pull fodder for three days at twenty- 
five cents a day to pay for the volume, and the 
boy in revenge bestowed on him the enduring 
niclmame of ''Blue Nose." 

From these books he made extracts in brier- 
root ink with a pen made from a buzzard's 
quill. Sometimes he figured with charcoal on 
the wooden fire-shovel, shaving it off white and 
clean when it was covered. He studied by the 
firelight, and was up with his book at dawn. 
He read everything, even the Revised Statutes 
of Indiana; and, if he did not commit its con- 
tents to memory,— for so preposterously has 
the legend grown,— he must have studied the 
Declaration of Independence and the Constitu- 
tion. He would mount a stump and harangue 
the field hands, telling even then his stories or 
imitating to the life the last itinerant preacher 
who had passed that way. He wrote, too, 
articles on "Temperance," on ''Government," 
and on "Cruelty to Animals." Unkindness he 
could not endure, and unkindness was not un- 
common among those thoughtless folk. Thus 

33 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

he made friends — even of the town drunkard, 
whose hfe he saved one night by dragging him 
from a ditch. He even attempted rhymes and 
satire, not always in the best taste, avenging 
himself on Blue Nose Crawford and on the 
Grigsbys for not inviting him to a wedding. 
Of course, he attended court over at Boonville, 
walking fifteen miles to watch the little come- 
dies and tragedies. Once he was bold enough 
to congratulate counsel for defence in a murder 
trial, and years afterward, in the White House, 
the greatest of the Presidents said to that law- 
yer, "I felt that, if I could ever make as good 
a speech as that, my soul would be satisfied." 
He said his "father taught him to work, but 
never taught him to love it." He preferred the 
pioneer sports, — running and wrestling, — but 
he did work, and worked hard, making rails, 
ploughing, mowing, doing everything. At 
nineteen he attained his extraordinary physical 
growth, *'six feet, two inches tall, weighing one 
hundred and fifty pounds — with long arms and 
legs, huge and awkward feet and hands, a slen- 

34 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

der body and small head." Surely, an un- 
gainly figure, almost grotesque, in coon-skin 
cap, linsey-woolsey shirt, and buckskin breeches 
so short that they exposed his shins. He was 
said to be "equal to three men," able to "hft and 
bear a pair of logs." He could "strike with a 
maul a heavier blow — could sink an axe deeper 
into wood than any man I ever saw." 

In 1828 he went for the first time out into 
the world as bowman on a flatboat, down to 
New Orleans. It was an adventure for him, of 
course, — at Baton Rouge a fight with negroes, 
at New Orleans the levees and the slave mart. 
Thus he grew and came to manhood, with 
some knowledge of books, some knowledge of 
men, some knowledge of life. His learning 
was tainted with the superstitions that were rife 
in the settlement, and always, in a measure, 
they clung to him, to merge in later years into 
the mysticism of his poetic nature. There had 
been sorrows, too: his sister Sarah had married 
and died in child-birth; then in 1829 the milk- 
sick again, and the call of the West. 

35 



ABRAHAM LINCOLlSr 

In March, 1830, they set out for lUinois. 
The tall young Abraham, in coonskin cap and 
buckskins, strode beside the huge wagon, wield- 
ing a long gad over the oxen. They were two 
weeks on the way, over roads that froze by 
night and thawed by day, but at last they all 
arrived safely in the Sangamon country, even 
the dog which, left behind one morning after 
they had forded a stream, looked with such re- 
proachful eyes that the tender-hearted Abra- 
ham waded to his rescue back through the icy 
waters. John Hanks met them five miles 
north-west of Decatur, in Macon County; and 
on a bluff overlooking the muddy Sangamon 
they built a cabin, split rails, fenced in fifteen 
acres, and broke the virgin prairie. Abraham 
was twenty-one and free. He remained in 
Macon County, however, that winter, splitting 
rails, "four hundred for every yard of jeans 
dyed with walnut juice necessary to make him 
a pair of trousers," and all of them for history, 
and in the spring found a patron in Denton 
Offut, an adventurer who engaged him, with 

36 



ABRAHAINI LINCOLN 

Hanks, to take a boat-load of provisions to 
New Orleans. At New Salem the boat 
grounded on a dam, and but for Lincoln's inge- 
nuity would have been broken up. The inci- 
dent moved Lincoln to invent and ultimately, 
in 1849, to patent an apparatus to lift vessels 
over shoals, and it introduced him to New 
Salem with eclat, for the people gathered and 
cheered the young navigator when he cleverly 
contrived to get his boat off the dam and on its 
way. At New Orleans he spent a month on 
the levee, among the half -savage rivermen ; and 
the slave mart brought home to him in all poign- 
ancy and pity the institution he had already be- 
gun to study and, perhaps, to hate. 

In August he was back at New Salem, "a 
piece of floating driftwood," as he said, await- 
ing Offut, who was to open a store. The vil- 
lage had a busy land office, twenty log cabins, 
and a hundred inhabitants. In seven years it 
had vanished from the earth. Here Lincoln 
loafed about, a river boatman out of a job, un- 
til election day, and then, naturally, loafed 

37 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

about the polls. Mentor Graham, village 
schoolmaster, clerk of elections, needed an as- 
sistant, and, looking up, saw the tall, young 
stranger. *'Can you write ?" he asked. "I can 
make a few rabbit tracks," said Lincoln. He 
did the work to Graham's satisfaction, and, 
while the voters straggled up, "spun a stock of 
Indiana yarns." They made a hit, and New 
Salem long afterwards repeated his stories, 
even those, perhaps, that would better not have 
been repeated. Offut opened his store, put 
Lincoln in charge, bragged of him, and claimed 
that he could outrun, whip, or throw any man 
in Sangamon County. The '^Clary's Grove 
Boys" — ^the name itself suggests their charac- 
ter — issued promptly from their strip of tim- 
ber, declaring that Jack Armstrong was "a bet- 
ter man than Lincoln." Lincoln said he did 
not like to "tussle and scuffle," and despised 
"pulling and wooling," but he was badgered 
into it, and gave their champion a famous 
thrashing. The victory established him in 
New Salem, and the Clary's Grove Boys 

38 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

formed the nucleus of his pohtical following. 
Before long he had part in a picturesque scene, 
piloting the first steamboat, the Talisman, up 
the Sangamon. There was a banquet at 
Springfield to celebrate the event, but Lincoln 
was not invited. Only the "gentlemen" w^ere 
asked, and Lincoln was but a pilot. Within a 
year Offut failed, and Lincoln found himself 
floating driftwood again. 

A young man in the Illinois of 1832, who 
was ambitious, given to stump-speaking, to the 
reading of history and of law, and to arguing in 
country stores, must necessarily have found a 
lively interest in politics. So it was with Lin- 
coln. From youth he had been attracted by 
the romantic figure of Henry Clay, and had 
adopted most of his political principles. If he 
was not a Whig, he was Whiggish, as Lamon 
puts it. To one of Clay's principles, that of 
gradual, compensated emancipation, he clung 
with devotion all his life. In March, there- 
fore, of the year under notice, he announced 
himself as a candidate for the legislature, de- 

39 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

daring in favour of "at least a moderate educa- 
tion" for every man, and a law against usury, 
though "in cases of extreme necessity there 
could always be means found to cheat the law. 
. . . My case is thrown exclusively upon the 
independent voters of the county. . . . But if 
the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to 
keep me in the background, I have been too 
familiar with disappointments to be very much 
chagrined." 

Here, indeed, with the people he had to leave 
his case, for his campaign was presently inter- 
rupted by the Black Hawk War. The old 
chief of the Sacs, who gave his name to this last 
Indian uprising in Illinois, had broken the 
treaties by which the tribes had gone beyond 
the Mississippi, and, asserting that "land can- 
not be sold," appeared at the head of his braves 
in war paint on the ancestral hunting-grounds 
in northern Illinois. Governor Beynolds 
called for volunteers, and Lincoln was among 
the first to respond. The Clary's Grove Boys, 
glad of a chance of fun and fighting, enlisted 

40 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

enthusiastically, and elected Lincoln captain, — 
*'a success," he afterwards wrote, "which gave 
me more pleasure than any I have had since." 
His enjoymentjof the whole experience, indeed, 
seems to have been keen. But withal there 
were weariness and hardship. He was learn- 
ing something of the gentle art of ruling men, 
though with his company, impatient of disci- 
pline, the art was not so gentle, after all; and 
there is an instance in which Captain Lincoln 
had to face his whole command, mutinous and 
threatening, and to put his own body between 
them and a poor friendly Indian who, with safe 
conduct from General Cass, had taken refuge 
in camp. When his company was mustered 
out, he re-enlisted immediately as a private. 
He saw no fighting and killed no Indians, and 
was able long afterward to convulse Congress 
by a humorous account of his "war record." 
The war ended in July, and he got back to New 
Salem in time to stump the county before the 
election in August, when he was defeated, — 
"the only time," as he said in the Autohiog- 

41 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

rapJiy, "I have ever been beaten by the peo- 
ple." 

Failing of employment in the three village 
groceries, he and a man named Berry bought 
out one of them, giving their notes for the pur- 
chase price. Then, by the same means, they 
bought out the other two, and thus had a 
monopoly. But unlike some monopolies, even 
when procured by such financiering, this did 
not succeed. Then the firm secured a license 
to sell liquor, — an incident of the business in 
those days, — but Berry drank up the liquor 
himself, while Lincoln, his heels cocked up on 
the counter, or sprawling under a tree outside 
the door, was reading Shakespeare, Burns, 
Gibbon, RoUin, and a little later Paine and 
Voltaire. It is said that he wrote a mono- 
graph on Deism which was burned by a friend, 
who just then had more political sense than 
Lincoln, though later on neither he nor any man 
could have had more. Next he was deep in 
Blacks tone. He had found the book in a 
barrel of rubbish he had obligingly bought from 

42 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

some poor fellow in trouble, and nothing had 
ever so interested and absorbed him. He be- 
gan, too, with the help of Mentor Graham, the 
study of English grammar. 

With both members of the firm thus preoc- 
cupied, it is not surprising that in the spring 
of 1833 the business "winked out," to use Lin- 
coln's phrase. He was not a "business man" 
then or ever. Soon Berry died, and Lincoln 
was left alone with the firm's indebtedness, 
about twelve hundred dollars, — to him an ap- 
palling sum. But, with the humour that saved 
every situation to him, he called it "the national 
debt," and, paying it as he could, he was thus 
referring to it as late as 1848, sending home 
part of his salary as Congressman to apply 
on it. 

In May he was commissioned postmaster 
of New Salem. The office was so small that 
old Andrew Jackson must have overlooked it, 
— so small, indeed, that Lincoln distributed the 
letters from his hat and read the newspapers 
before he delivered them. But he was scrupu- 

43 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

lous always, and years afterward, when a gov- 
ernment agent came to Springfield to make 
settlement, Lincoln from his trunk drew forth 
"an old blue sock with a quantity of silver and 
copper coin tied up in it," and was able to turn 
over the identical moneys he had collected in his 
official capacity, which, often and sorely as he 
had needed money, he had never touched. 

And now he got a better chance. With the 
wild speculation in Illinois lands, John Cal- 
houn, county surveyor, had more than he could 
do, and offered Lincoln a post as deputy. Lin- 
coln knew nothing of surveying, but said he 
could learn, and, bargaining for political free- 
dom, — Calhoun was a Democrat, — he mastered 
the science and went to work. His surveys 
were accurate, and he was doing well, when 
suddenly "the national debt" loomed before him 
in the sinister figure of a man who held notes 
of the extinct firm. But he found friends, and 
James Short and Bowling Green, justice of the 
peace, redeemed for him his horse and survey- 
ing instruments which the creditor had levied 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

on. Indeed, the whole story of those New 
Salem days is the story of the kindness, the 
helpfulness, that always prevail among the 
poor. One pictm^e reveals it all. Hannah 
Ai^mstrong, the wife of that Jack whom Lin- 
coln thrashed, always had milk and mush or 
cornbread for him. He would "bring the chil- 
dren candy, and rock the cradle while she got 
him something to eat." And, when Lincoln 
got buckskins as his first pay for surveying 
Hannah ''foxed" them on his trousers. In 
1834 Lincoln again offered himself for the leg- 
islature. All that summer he was electioneer- 
ing, making speeches, lifting and throwing 
weights, wrestling, cradling in the harvest 
fields, telling stories. He was elected this time, 
at the head of the poll; and an old friend of 
the Black Hawk War, Major John T. Stuart, 
was one of the successful candidates on the 
ticket with him. Stuart loaned him law books, 
and Lincoln began to practise, in the small way 
of the pettifogger, before Squire Bowling 
Green. 

45 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

When the legislature convened at Vandalia, 
he was there, making "a decent appearance'' 
in new clothes, for the purchase of which an- 
other New Salem friend had loaned the money. 
He spent the winter there, reading in the State 
library, and learning otherwise of laws and the 
curious making of them. He was assigned, in- 
appropriately, it would seem, to the House 
Committee on Finance. Many of the men he 
met were cast for big parts in the drama just 
then opening in Illinois, among them a dashing 
youth of twenty-two, lately come from Ver- 
mont, with but thirty-seven cents in his pocket, 
but already admitted to the bar and running for 
ofBce, — Stephen A. Douglas, whom Lincoln 
noted as "the least man I ever saw." For 
twenty-eight years this least man was to be his 
rival, even in love, though he was not his rival 
in the love which then was filling Lincoln's sus- 
ceptible heart. Back in New Salem he had left 
Anne Rutledge, a pretty maid with auburn 
hair and blue eyes. But Anne was already 
betrothed. Her lover, James McNamar, had 

46 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

gone back East, promising to return. After 
a while his letters ceased. Then there was 
rumour, while Anne waited — and Lincoln al- 
ways at her side, wooing her, even at the quilt- 
ing bees. She sang for him, and sometimes, 
one could wish, songs more cheerful than those 
hymns the chroniclers report. It seems prob- 
able that the verses, "Oh, why should the spirit 
of mortal be proud?" were learned from her, 
and that they owed their almost morbid fascina- 
tion for him to an association with this phase 
and period. Soon Anne sickened, and in 
August died. New Salem said it was of a 
broken heart, but toward the end she sent for 
Lincoln, and he was at the bedside, alone with 
her. 

After her death there settled upon him a ter- 
rible despondency. That fall and winter he 
wandered alone in the woods, along the Sanga- 
mon, almost crazed with sorrow. "The very 
thought of the rains and snows falling upon 
her grave filled him with indescribable grief." 
His friends watched him, and at last, when on 

47 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the very verge of insanit}^, Bowling Green took 
him to his home, nursed him back to health, and 
the grief faded to that temperamental melan- 
choly which, relieved only by his humour, was 
part of the poet there was in him, part of the 
prophet, the sadness that so early baptised him 
in the tragedy of life, and taught him pity for 
the suffering of a world of men. 

In July he was running for the legislature 
again. "I go for all sharing the privileges of 
the government who assist in bearing its bur- 
dens," he said in his address. "Consequently, 
I go for admitting all whites to the right of 
suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no 
means excluding females). ... If elected, I 
shall consider the whole people of Sangamon 
my constituents, as well those that oppose as 
those that support me. While acting as their 
representative I shall be governed by their will 
on all subjects upon which I have the means of 
knowing what their will is ; and upon all others 
I shall do what my own judgment teaches me 
will best advance their interests." 

48 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

The whole theory of representative govern- 
ment was never more clearly understood, never 
more clearly expressed. Even then he had an 
occult sense of public opinion, knew what the 
general mind was thinking. Always funda- 
mentally democratic, he was so close to the 
heart of humanity that intuitively he measured 
its mighty pulsations, and believed that the 
public mind w^as not far from the right. Years 
afterward, expressing his belief in the pec^le's 
judgment as the one authority in affairs, he 
asked, "Is there any better or equal hope?" 

One incident of that bitter campaign must 
be given. George Forquer, a Whig, about 
the time he changed his politics and became a 
Democrat, received appointment as register of 
the Land Office. His house, the finest resi- 
dence in Springfield, was distinguished for its 
lightning rod, the first that Lincoln or Spring- 
field had ever seen. At a meeting held near 
Forquer's home, Lincoln spoke, and, when he 
had done, Forquer announced that "he would 
have to take the young man down." Lincoln 

49 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

stood by with folded arms, endured the attack, 
and then, replying spiritedly, concluded by say- 
ing: "The gentleman has seen fit to allude to 
my being a young man; but he forgets that I 
am older in years than I am in the tricks and 
trades of politicians. I desire to live, and I 
desire place and distinction, but I would rather 
die now than, like the gentleman, live to see 
the day that I would change my politics for an 
office worth three thousand dollars a year, and 
then feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to 
protect a guilty conscience from an offended 
God." 

The Whig ticket was elected, Lincoln lead- 
ing the poll. The Sangamon delegation, seven 
representatives and two senators, each over six 
feet tall, were known as the "Long Nine." 
"All of the bad or objectionable laws passed 
at that session," says one of them, "and for 
many years afterwards, were chargeable to the 
management and influence of the *Long 
Nine.'" An extensive system of pubhc im- 
provements was being urged, — canals and rail- 

50 



ABRAHAJNI LINCOLN 

roads, to be paid for from the proceeds of the 
sale of public lands, as Lincoln said, "without 
borrowing money and paying the interest on 
it." This wonderful scheme was to develop 
Illinois immediately, and the people were 
dazzled by it. Lincoln, infatuated like the 
rest, was already dreaming of the governor- 
ship, confiding to a friend his purpose to be- 
come the "DeWitt Clinton of Ilhnois." At 
Vandalia he was the leader of the Long Nine, 
and laboured to advance this project. The 
Assembly voted to construct the system of rail- 
roads and canals, and authorised an immediate 
loan of $12,000,000. Such a colossal scheme, 
making or blasting communities, afforded, of 
course, infinite opportunity for local and spe- 
cial legislation. In such an atmosphere of 
manoeuvre, Lincoln was wholly in his element. 
None knew human nature better than he, none 
was more expert in log-rolling, and he and his 
"Long Nine" rolled their logs so skilfully that 
they succeeded in removing the capital of Il- 
linois to Springfield. 

51 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

And yet, while all this showed that he knew^ 
perhaps more of the tricks and trades of the 
politicians than he had admitted in his en- 
counter with Forquer, he was true to principle. 
When the legislature adopted resolutions 
"highly disapproving" of "the formation of 
abolition societies and the doctrines promul- 
gated by them," Lincoln voted against them; 
and, while nothing more was demanded of him, 
— certainly half so much could not have been 
expected of a mere politician, — he drew up a 
protest against the resolutions, and inducing 
his colleague, Dan Stone, to sign it with him, 
had the protest entered upon the journal for 
March 3, 1837. The protest was cautiously 
worded, but it did declare that "the institution 
of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad 
policy." 

When the "Long Nine" went home in 
March, taking the capital with them, a celebra- 
tion was arranged, the like of which Spring- 
field had not seen since that day the Talisman 
came up the Sangamon. There was a ban- 

52 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

quet, and, though Lincoln was as much the 
pilot in this enterprise as he had been in the 
other, the fact did not exclude him: rather it 
gave him place at the head of the board. He 
was toasted as "one of nature's noblemen," as 
one who "has fulfilled the expectations of his 
friends and disappointed the hopes of his ene- 
mies," and, of course, he made a speech. It 
is not strange that after this he should remove 
to Springfield, for he had finished his law stud- 
ies, and IMarch 24, 1836, had been "certified as 
of good moral character" for admission to the 
bar. 



53 



II 

The new capital of Illinois in the spring of 
1837 was a town of less than two thousand in- 
habitants, deep in mud, and yet to Lincoln, en- 
tering one morning the store of Joshua Speed 
with all his belongings in his saddle-bags, 
it was a metropolis. Speed said the young 
man had the saddest face he ever saw; though 
when told that he could share Speed's bed in a 
room above, and Lincoln had shambled up, 
dropped his saddle-bags, and shambled down 
again. Speed smiled at the dry way in which 
Lincoln remarked, — 

'^Well, Speed, I'm moved." 

But the town was not so small that it could 
not boast social distinctions. The Todds, 
Stuarts, and Edwardses were there, and, with 
the Lambs, Mathers, Opdykes, Forquers, and 
Fords, were the leaders of the provincial aris- 
tocracy. Lincoln observed all this, and soon 

54 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

was writing to a girl he had been in love with 
that there "is a good deal of flourishing about 
in carriages here," though he wrote this, it 
seems, in warning rather than in entreaty, ex- 
plaining that, as his wife, she "would be poor, 
without the means of concealing her poverty." 
This latest love was Mary Owens, to whom 
quixotically he felt himself bound, but erelong 
he wrote : "If you feel yourself in any degree 
bound to me, I am now willing to release you, 
provided you wish it ; while, on the other hand, 
I am willing to bind you faster, if I can be con- 
vinced that it will in any considerable degree 
add to your happiness." This cautious letter 
naturally ended the affair, as it was probably 
intended to do. Mary Owens never took his 
attentions too seriously. While she respected 
him, she considered him " deficient in those 
little links which make up the chain of woman's 
happiness." 

Meanwhile he had begun to practise law. 
His old friend of the Black Hawk War, Major 
John T. Stuart, who had loaned him law books, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

took him into partnership. To Stuart, as to 
so many lawyers, the law was but a milieu for 
politics; he was contesting the Congressional 
election with Douglas, and, as Lincoln himself 
was thinking more of politics than of law, it is 
not strange that the business suffered. Lin- 
coln spent his time at Speed's store, talking 
politics and arguing religion. He delivered 
a highly rhetorical address before "The Young 
Men's Lyceum" on "The Perpetuation of our 
Free Institutions," and in the Presbyterian 
church he engaged in a formal partisan debate 
with Douglas, Calhoun, Lamborn, and 
Thomas. In 1838 he was again elected to the 
legislature, and was minority candidate for 
Speaker. The panic of 1837 had brought to 
Illinois the hour of reckoning for the internal 
improvement bubble, and in that session Lin- 
coln, again on the Finance Committee, trying 
to repair the mischief he had helped to make, 
owned that he was "no financier," and admitted 
his "share of the responsibility in the present 
crisis." In 1840 he was again elected, and 

5Q 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

again defeated for Speaker, and nothing more 
important befell during that session than his 
joining other Whigs in an ignominious flight 
through the window in order to break a 
quorum. In the campaign he had had many- 
exciting engagements, — one, for instance, with 
Jesse B. Thomas, a Democrat who in a speech 
attacked the "Long Nine," Lincoln especially. 
Lincoln replied, and with that talent which 
years before had amused Gentryville, mimicked 
Thomas in voice and manner, while the crowd 
roared with delight. Carried away, he ex- 
posed Thomas to such scathing ridicule that 
the poor fellow actually wept. The event was 
destined to live in local annals as "the skinning 
of Thomas," but it was a triumph of which 
Lincoln was so ashamed that he hunted up 
his victim, implored forgiveness, and tried to 
heal the wounds he had inflicted. Less and less 
thereafter did he resort to the unworthy weap- 
ons he could wield so skilfully, but more and 
more invoked the power of reason and of his 
own kindly humour. 



ABRAHAI^I LINCOLN 

He had, too, conflicts with Douglas, as he 
was destined to have for a quarter of a century, 
for in that year of the gay campaign for 
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too," Lincoln was on 
the Whig, and Douglas on the Democratic, 
electoral ticket. The campaign had hardly 
ended with the triumph of Harrison than the 
two entered into another rivalry, — this time for 
the hand of a woman. Mary Todd, a Ken- 
tucky girl, had come to Springfield to visit her 
sister, Mrs. Ninian W. Edwards, and in the 
local aristocracy that * 'flourished about in car- 
riages" soon was the reigning belle, with Lin- 
coln and Douglas in her train. In the pursuit 
of a proud, clever girl, who "spoke French 
or English with equal fluency," the brilliant, 
dashing Douglas might have been expected to 
distance the slow, ungainly Lincoln. Some 
account for her preference for Lincoln on the 
strained hypothesis that she had determined to 
marry a future President, which is absurd, be- 
cause Douglas then seemed more likely than 
any unknown young man in Springfield to 

58 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

reach that lofty chair, and it was not many 
years before he seemed the hkehest man in all 
America. But Mary Todd made her own 
choice, and she and Lincoln were engaged to 
be married on New Year's Day, 1841. But, 
after the day was set, Lincoln was filled wdth 
uncertainty. Springfield intimated a new at- 
tachment, another pretty face. The day came, 
the wedding was not solemnised. Now there 
came upon him again that black and awful mel- 
ancholy. He neglected the law, neglected the 
legislature, and wandered about, as before, in 
utter gloom, actually, it is said, contemplating 
suicide. "I am now the most miserable man 
living," he wrote to Stuart. *'If what I feel 
were equally distributed to the whole human 
family, there would not be one cheerful face on 
earth. ... To remain as I am is impossible. 
I must die or be better, as it appears to me." 

To distract him, Joshua Speed, probably the 
closest friend he ever had, took him away to 
Kentucky, and there, amid new scenes, he im- 
proved, though he bemoaned the fact "that he 

59 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

had done nothing to make any human being re- 
member that he had lived." Speed himself 
was engaged to be married, and, curiously 
enough, had an experience of uncertainty 
similar to Lincoln's. On his return to Spring- 
field, Lincoln wrote Speed a series of letters, 
arguing against Speed's feehngs, perhaps at 
the same time arguing against his own, and 
when Speed was married at last, and happy, 
he wrote: ''It cannot be told how it thrills me 
with joy to hear you say you are 'far happier 
than you ever expected to be.' . . . Your last 
letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum 
of all I have enjoyed since that fatal first of 
January, 1841. ... I cannot but reproach 
myself for even wishing to be happy when she 
is otherwise. She accompanied a large party 
on the railroad cars to Jacksonville last Mon- 
day, and on her return spoke, so that I heard of 
it, of having enjoyed the trip exceedingly. 
God be praised for that!" 

About this time occurred another incident 
that influenced this odd courtship. The Audi- 

60 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

tor of State, James Shields, a "gallant, hot- 
headed bachelor from Tyrone County, Ire- 
land," afterwards a general and senator from 
three States, had had his vanity wounded by the 
publication in the Sangamon Journal of "Let- 
ters from Lost Townships." These pohtical 
lampoons were exactly of a style and humour to 
please Lincoln, and, when he learned that their 
author was Mary Todd, he was moved himself 
to write another in like vein. Shields de- 
manded the name of the author. The timid 
editor consulted Lincoln, who embraced the op- 
portunity of chivalry by taking on himself the 
whole responsibility. There followed a chal- 
lenge from Shields, and, observing every ab- 
surdity of the code of honour, a duel was ar- 
ranged, Lincoln choosing "cavalry broadswords 
of the largest size." The duelling ground was 
near Alton, and principals and seconds had 
repaired there, when "friends effected an ar- 
rangement." The affair got into the news- 
papers, and Lincoln was so ashamed of the 
escapade that no one ever dared mention it in 

61 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

his presence. "If all the good things I have 
ever done," he said, "are remembered as long 
and well as my scrape with Shields, it is plain I 
shall not soon be forgotten." But it helped 
to bring him and Mary Todd together, and on 
November 4, 1842, they were married. If it 
was a marriage not ideally happy, it may be 
conjectured that a happier one would have 
interfered with that career for which destiny 
was preparing him. 

In April, 1841, Stuart having been sent to 
Congress, Lincoln accepted the opportunity to 
end the partnership and formed another with 
Judge Stephen T. Logan, a little, weazened 
man, with high, shrill voice and a great plume 
of yellowed white hair, but picturesque in his 
old cape, and accounted the best lawyer in Il- 
linois. He loved money, and kept most of the 
earnings ; but this did not trouble Lincoln, who 
loved men more than money, and regarded 
wealth as "simply a superfluity of things we 
don't need." Contact with Logan made him 
a closer student and an abler practitioner of 

62 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

the law, but two such strong personahties could 
not long work side by side, and in 1843 Lin- 
coln formed a partnership with William H. 
Ilerndon, a young radical, already consorting 
with the abolitionists, and afterwards Lincoln's 
biographer. The partnership endured until 
Lincoln's death. But the struggle was hard, 
and Lincoln and his bride were perforce frugal, 
* not keeping house," as he wrote to Speed, 
"but boarding at the Globe Tavern, which is 
very well kept by a widow lady of the name of 
Beck. Our room and boarding only costs us 
four dollars a week. ... I am so poor and 
make so little headway in the world that I drop 
back in a month of idleness as much as I gain 
in a year's sowing." In 1841 he might have 
had the nomination for governor, but, after 
his experience of the internal improvement 
dream, he had foregone his ambition to become 
the "DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." He had an 
eye, however, as doubtless his ambitious wife 
had, on the political field, and already was cast- 
ing glances toward Congress. He met op- 

63 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

position, of course. On Washington's Birth- 
day, 1842, during the Washingtonian temper- 
ance movement, in an address on ''Temper- 
ance" he deplored the Pharisaical attitude of 
some church members toward the drunkard, 
saying, "If we take the habitual drunkards, as 
a class, their heads and hearts will bear an ad- 
vantageous comparison with those of any other 
class." The whole admirable address is con- 
ceived in a tone of the highest humanitarian- 
ism, quite distinct from that of the professional 
reformer of other persons, — a tone which Lin- 
coln, of all men, must have despised. He was 
full of a wise and gentle tolerance that sprang 
equally from his knowledge and his love of 
men. He said about this time, when "ac- 
cused" of being a "temperance" man, "I am 
temperate in this, to wit: I don't drink." 
But so temperate an address was certain to fall 
short of the demands of the more intemperate 
of the temperance reformers. He was criti- 
cised, and because of this, and because his wife, 
as an Episcopalian, a Todd and kin to the 

64 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Edwardses, was an "aristocrat," and because 
he had "once talked of fighting a duel," he had 
to postpone his Congressional ambitions. 
There were, besides, ^'political complications." 
He stood aside for Hardin and for Baker, and 
it was said that there was an agreement among 
them — Hardin, Baker, Lincoln, and Logan — 
that "they should in turn have the coveted hon- 
our." In 1844 he was on the Whig electoral 
ticket, and not only stumped Illinois for Henry 
Clay, but went over into Indiana and had the 
satisfaction of speaking at Gentryville, where 
he was so moved by memories that he ex- 
pressed his sentiments in verse, which, if not 
poetical in form, were, as he himself pleaded, 
poetic in feeling. 

At last, in 1846, he was nominated and 
elected to Congress. His Democratic oppo- 
nent was old Peter Cartwright, the pioneer 
Methodist preacher, who did not hesitate to 
use the Washington Birthday address against 
Lincoln, or to charge atheism, going back for 
evidence to the New Salem days and the mono- 

65 



ABRAHA^I LINCOLN 

graph in the Tom Paine style Lincoln was said 
to have written. 

The charge of atheism was not altogether 
lacking in foundation, for, while deeply and in 
a poetic and mystic way profoundly religious, 
Lincoln never united with any church, and his 
theological opinions were not orthodox. Then 
and down to his death he seems to have been 
unitarian in belief, and said that whenever any 
church would inscribe over its altar, as the sole 
qualification for membership, the words of 
Jesus, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy soul, and with all thy might, and with 
all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thy- 
self," he would join that church. Surely, as 
far as man may, in a complicated civihsation 
which dares not take Christianity too literally, 
he exemplified this religion. 

When, in 1847, Lincoln took his seat in the 
Thirtieth Congress, he found there the last 
of the giants of the old days, — Webster, Cal- 
houn, and Clay, and old John Quincy Adams, 
dying in his seat before the session ended. 

66 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Douglas was there, too, to take his new seat 
in the Senate. Lincoln, soon a favourite for 
his stories and for the quaint manner of which 
he was so unconscious, was among those in- 
vited to Webster's breakfasts, and became the 
friend of Joshua R. Giddings. The Whigs 
were in a majority, as a result of popular dis- 
approval of President Polk's course in a war 
of which America has always felt half-ashamed, 
and, while criticising the President, neverthe- 
less made what capital they could out of the 
brilliant victories the Whig generals, Scott and 
Taylor, had achieved, and voted them supplies. 
With this course Lincoln was in sympathy. 
"By way of getting the hang of the House," 
he wrote Herndon, "I made a little speech, 
. . . and was about as badly scared, and no 
worse, as I am when I speak in court. . . . 
As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish 
myself, I have concluded to do so before long." 
This half-humorous promise he kept by intro- 
ducing the famous "SjDot" Resolutions, so 
called because after quoting the President's as- 

67 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

sertions that Mexico had first "invaded our 
territory," and "shed the blood of our citizens 
on our own soil," they requested the Presi- 
dent in a series of adroit questions to inform the 
House on what "spot" all this had occurred. 
The searching interpellation was met by silence 
in the White House. On January 12, 1848, 
Lincoln called up the resolutions and spoke in 
their support. They were not acted upon, but 
they served to expose Polk's duplicity and to 
make their author known. 

That spring he was writing home to Hern- 
don to organise all the "shrewd, wild boys 
about town" in "Old Rough and Ready's" 
cause, — although but thirty-nine, he was al- 
ready feeling old, — and, after he had helped to 
nominate Taylor in June, he dehvered on the 
floor of Congress a stump speech that kept the 
House roaring with its ridicule of the Demo- 
cratic candidate. "By the way, Mr. Speaker, 
did you know I am a military hero? Yes, sir, 
in the days of the Black Hawk War, I fought, 
bled, and came away. ... It is quite certain 

68 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

I did not break my sword, for I had none to 
break; but I bent my musket pretty badly on 
one occasion. If Cass broke his sword, the 
idea is, he broke it in desperation. I bent the 
musket by accident. If General Cass went in 
advance of me picldng whortleberries, I guess 
I surpassed him in charges upon wild onions. 
If he saw any live Indians, it was more than 
I did, but I had a good many bloody struggles 
with mosquitoes ; and, although I never fainted 
from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often 
very hungry." 

He was on the electoral ticket and stumped 
New England and Illinois for Taylor. The 
New England speeches were full of moral 
earnestness, and most significant was the fact 
that, after hearing Governor Seward speak in 
Boston, he said: "I reckon you are right. 
We have got to deal with this slavery ques- 
tion, and got to give much more attention to 
it hereafter than we have been doing." In 
December he went back to Washington for the 
second session, and stood consistently for the 

69 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Wilmot Proviso, designed to exclude slavery 
from territory acquired from Mexico, and while 
in Congress, as he afterwards said, voted for 
the principle "about forty-two times." And 
he introduced, and almost succeeded in passing, 
an act excluding slavery from the District of 
Columbia. 

But, as he had known all along, his opposi- 
tion to the Mexican War had been displeasing 
to his constituents, who would rather be warlike 
than right. Besides introducing "the Spot 
Resolutions," he had voted for Ashmun's 
amendment, which declared that "the war had 
been unnecessarily and unconstitutionally com- 
menced by the President." But he would not 
"skulk": he had "voted for the truth rather 
than for a lie." It cost him his renomination, 
and, when Logan was nominated to succeed 
him, Lincoln's course lost the district even to 
him. He tried to obtain the appointment as 
commissioner of the General Lands Office, but 
failed. Then he was offered the governor- 
ship of the new Territory of Oregon, and 

70 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

thought of accepting, but his wife fortunately 
said "no," and he went back to Springfield and 
out on the muddy roads of the old Eighth Cir- 
cuit, a saddened, disillusioned, and disap- 
pointed man. 

His figure, garbed in black, became familiar 
to Springfield, as he strode along, usually with 
one of his boys tugging at him, between his 
dwelling in Eighth Street and his dingy law 
office on the Square. Though clean in dress 
and person and with the most orderly of minds, 
he was not orderly in his affairs. He carried 
most of his legal documents in his high hat; 
and there is a direction, written in his own 
hand, on a bundle of papers, "When you can't 
find it anywhere else, look into this." He kept 
poor accounts, forgot to enter charges in his 
books, but, when money was paid in, he divided 
it, put half of it in his pocket, and left the 
other labelled "Herndon's half." He could 
not exact retainers or charge large fees, and he 
needed money in those days. His father had 
moved three times, and when he died, in 1851, 

71 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

there was a mortgage on the farm in Coles 
County to be raised, his mother to help, and a 
shiftless stepbrother, John Johnston, to ex- 
postulate with in letters deeply interesting. 
Besides, the "national debt" still hung over 
him, though about this time he succeeded in 
paying the last of it. But he was working 
hard, and rapidly developing into one of the 
best lawyers in Illinois. 

What joy there was for him in a life that 
carries the impression of having been destined 
for great sacrifice came to him on the old 
Eighth Judicial Circuit. Here, in an uncom- 
monly active practice, he encountered such men 
as Leonard Swett, Judge Logan, Edward D. 
Baker, O. H. Browning, Richard J. Oglesby, 
and John ]^I. Palmer. Twice a year, spring 
and fall, the lawyers went out on the circuit in 
the train of Judge David Davis, massive and 
able. Lincoln was Davis's favourite. When 
he arrived at a tavern, Davis would look about 
and ask, "Where's Lincoln?" and his great 
form shook with delight over Lincoln's droller- 

72 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

ies. The stories now and then disturbed the 
dignity of the court, for, if Lincoln were not 
engaged in the case on trial, he would have a 
knot of men about him in the court-room. 
]More than once Davis was forced to say: 
*'Mr. Lincoln, I can't stand this. There is no 
use trying to carry on two courts : I must ad- 
journ mine, or you yours." But a few min- 
utes later he would beckon one of the group to 
the bench, and ask, "What was that story Lin- 
coln was telling?" 

The impression, however, that Lincoln was 
a mere story-teller, a raconteur, a lawyer who 
practised by his wits, is inaccurate. He was 
fundamentally serious and a man of dignity: 
he was not given to uncouth familiarities. 
Men referred to him affectionately as "Hon- 
est Abe" or "Old Abe," but they addi^ssed 
him always as "JMr. Lincoln." His humour, 
never peccant, was close to his brooding mel- 
ancholy, and saved every situation in a life he 
knew so profoundly as to feel its tragedy and 
its tears. It was not for his stories that men 

73 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

loved him : it was for his kindliness, his simplic- 
ity, his utter lack of self -consciousness. Of 
course there was the mysterious influence of his 
personality, and the fascination of a nature 
that seemed complex only because, in the midst 
of many complexities, it was, after all, so sim- 
ple. All his life long he strove to make things 
clear, and to men, to juries, to statesmen, dip- 
lomats, and whole peoples he was ever explain- 
ing, and he told his stories to help this purpose. 
Thus he drew interested groups about him, on 
the public square, in the court-room, in the 
tavern. 

These taverns were di^adful places by all 
accounts, with cooking bad enough to make 
any man melancholy, but Lincoln was the last 
to complain of the inconveniences. He liked 
the life, with its roving, careless freedom and 
its comradeship. They all sat at table to- 
gether, — lawyers, jurymen, litigants, witnesses, 
even prisoners, if they had friends who could 
get them out on bail; and Lincoln liked the 
foot of the table as well as the head, where the 

74 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

huge Davis presided. He would sleep two in 
a bed or eight in a room, and in the evenings 
he would sit with them all in a Bohemian socia- 
bility, though now and then, when his melan- 
choly was on him, he would slip away, perhaps 
to pore over problems in Euclid in order to 
learn the meaning of "demonstrate," or to 
study German, or to attend some little magic 
lantern show given for the children, — pathetic 
evidence of his restricted opportunities, for it 
was his destiny to be fond of the theatre. 

But he was not always mild, he was not al- 
ways funny. He could be terrible when 
aroused, and nothing so aroused him as un- 
truth or injustice. He was dreadful in cross- 
examination, as many of the stories show, and 
he had a subtle, almost occult power over wit- 
nesses and over juries. "If I can clean this 
case of technicahties," he once remarked to 
Herndon, "and get it properly swung to the 
jury, I'll win it." And, surely, no one could 
swing cases to juries better than he. He had, 
in the first place, an extraordinarily sympa- 

75 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

thetic and profound knowledge of human na- 
ture. Part of this was intuitive, some inex- 
phcable element of the almost feminine gentle- 
ness that was in him. Part of it came from his 
wide experience with almost primitive men. 
Then there was the commanding dignity of his 
presence: men might describe him as homely, 
but when stirred, when in the heat and passion 
of forensic effort, his features lighted up with 
a strange beauty. And there was his drudg- 
ing, laborious determination to make things 
clear; and, above all, there was his honesty of 
statement, of motive, of method, so that courts 
and juries believed what he said, and this, with 
that baffling power of the great personality, 
made him the ideal jury lawyer. He knew 
that a cause well stated is half won, and he had 
mastered the art of putting a question so that 
it answered itself. He was no quibbler, he was 
impatient of technicalities, and he was ready to 
make concessions all the time, quietly sitting 
there in the barren court-room, admitting this 
or that, "reckoning he must be wrong," that 

76 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

"that ought to be conceded," or that "that's 
about right," until, as Leonard Swett said, 
"about the time he had practised through three- 
quarters of the case in this way, his adversary 
would wake up to find himself beaten." 

He was a poor lawyer when he was on the 
wrong side of a case, and many times refused, 
and sometimes abandoned, causes in which he 
could not believe. Once, indeed, discovering 
in the very midst of a trial that his client had 
acted fraudulently, he stalked out of the court- 
room in disgust, and, when sent for by the 
judge, returned the answer that he "had gone 
out to wash his hands." He never was a good 
prosecutor: he had too much human sympathy; 
and he was no better business man then than 
in New Salem days. His charges were so 
small that Herndon and the other lawyers, and 
even Davis, who was avaricious, expostulated 
with him. His income was little more than 
two or three thousand a year. His name ap- 
pears in the Illinois Heports in one hundred 
and seventy-three cases, — a record entitling 

7T 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

him to first rank among the lawyers of his 
State. He was engaged in causes of the first 
importance, like that of the Illinois Central 
Railroad Company v. The County of McLean, 
in which for the railroad he successfully resisted 
an attempt to tax land ceded to the railroad by 
the State, — and had to sue to recover his modest 
fee of $5,000, — the Rock Island bridge case, 
and the McCormick reaper patent litigation. 
In this case he was of counsel with Edwin M. 
Stanton, who, in the federal court at Cincin- 
nati, treated him contemptuously, referring 
to him as "that giraffe," and prevented him 
from delivering the argument he had so solici- 
tously prepared. To a man of Lincoln's sen- 
sitiveness such an experience was intensely 
painful, and it shows how great he was that, 
despite the protestations of friends who re- 
called it all to him, and more besides, he ap- 
pointed Stanton his War Secretary. In this 
case he was paid $2,000, and this and the fee 
in the Illinois Central case were the largest he 
ever received. 

78 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Two of his great murder cases must always 
be recalled when his legal career is mentioned. 
In May, 1858, he defended William, or "Duff," 
the son of his old foe and friend. Jack Arm- 
strong. This youth, wild as the wildest of the 
Clary's Grove Boys had ever been, was charged 
with murder, and on the trial at Beardstown 
a witness told how, by moonlight, he had seen 
the blow struck. It was a pretty desperate 
case for William, and for Hannah, his mother, 
who had "foxed" the buckskins on Lincoln's 
trousers; but Lincohi, remembering old bene- 
fits, reassured her, and, subjecting the pros- 
ecuting witness to one of his dreadful cross- 
examinations, confronted him with the almanac 
of the year of the murder, and by it showed 
that, at the hour at which the witness claimed 
to have seen Armstrong strike the blow, the 
moon, only in its first quarter, had already set. 
The boy was acquitted, and Lincoln would 
have no fee but old Hannah's tears and grati- 
tude. The next year he appeared on behalf 
of "Peachy" Harrison, charged with the mur- 

79 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

der of Greek Crafton, and it must have been a 
dramatic moment when the aged Peter Cart- 
wright took the witness-stand and turned to 
face Lincoln, against whom he had waged a 
campaign for Congress so long before. Cart- 
wright was Harrison's grandfather, and the 
white head of the old pioneer Methodist 
preacher drooped to his breast as Lincoln had 
him tell how, as he lay dying, Greek Crafton 
had said, "I want you to say to my slayer that 
I forgive him." After such a scene and with 
such a dying declaration to build upon, Lin- 
coln was sure to make a speech that would touch 
the hearts of the jury with the forgiveness and 
the pity he himself felt for all souls in trouble ; 
and Harrison was acquitted. This was the 
last scene of that experience at the bar which 
made him the great lawyer he was, prepared 
him for the mighty legal argument with Doug- 
las, and fitted him to try and to win the great 
cause of humanity before the people and the 
world. 



80 



Ill 

Lincoln was losing interest in politics, 
when, in May, 1854, the abrogation of the Mis- 
souri Compromise aroused him. He was out 
on the circuit when the news of the Kansas- 
Nebraska bill came. All evening at the tavern 
he denounced it, and at dawn, when his room- 
mate, Judge Dickey, awoke, there he was, sit- 
ting on his bed. "I tell you, Dickey," Lincoln 
exclaimed, "this nation cannot exist half -slave 
and half- free!" From that hour he was more 
serious, more solitary, more studious than ever 
before. 

Douglas, whose new leadership had done 
this, came home in the fall to face an angry 
constituency. In Chicago he was hissed and 
hooted, but he set to work to win back his Il- 
linois. He spoke in Springfield, and Lincoln 
replied a few days later in a speech that aston- 

81 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ished even those who knew him best and loved 
him most. The abohtionists were so dehghted 
that Owen Love joy, whose father had met 
death in the cause at Alton, immediately ar- 
ranged a meeting of the "friends of liberty," in- 
tending to invite Lincoln to speak. Herndon 
was in their counsels, and, though radical as 
any of them, was more of a politician. He 
knew the danger to Lincoln of openly consort- 
ing just then with the abolitionists, and hur- 
riedly sent his law partner word to *'take Bob 
and drive somewhere into the country, and stay 
till this thing is over." Lincoln, already 
dreaming of the Senate, and wary, discreet, 
politic, took Bob in his buggy, and drove to 
Tazewell County, where Davis was holding 
court. Thus he escaped the dilemma. The 
next day Douglas spoke again, and Lincoln re- 
phed at Peoria. "Judge Douglas," he said, 
"frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm, 
paraphrases our argument by saying, *The 
white people of Nebraska are good enough to 
govern themselves, but they are not good 

82 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

enough to govern a few miserable negroes.' 
Well, I doubt not that the good people of 
Nebraska are, and will continue to be, as good 
as the average of people elsewhere. I do not 
say to the contrary. What I do say is, that 
no man is good enough to govern another man 
without that other's consent." 

These speeches were really the first of the 
great debate. They showed anti-Nebraska 
men and abolitionists that they had a champion 
on fire with the passion of a great cause, and 
the Little Giant so recognised their power that 
he proposed a truce, which Lincoln good- 
naturedly accepted. It was agreed that 
neither should speak again during the cam- 
paign, and it was like Douglas, on his way 
home, to stop in Princeton and deliver a long 
address. 

That fall, 1854, against his will, Lincoln was 
nominated and elected to the legislature, but, 
when he saw that many Democrats were in 
revolt, he resigned. *T have really got it into 
my head to try to be a United States senator," 

83 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

he wrote to a friend; *'and if I could have your 
support my chances would be reasonably good. 
I should like to be remembered affectionately 
by you, and also to have you make a mark for 
me with the anti-Nebraska members down 
your way." He had forty-five votes on the 
first ballot, February 8, 1855, Shields, the 
Democrat, his old duelling antagonist, forty- 
one, Trumbull, anti-Nebraska Democrat, five, 
with a few scattering. But the anti-Nebraska 
Democrats, holding the balance of power, 
would not go to Lincoln, and he generously 
urged his following to vote for Trumbull, which 
they did, and Trumbull was elected. 

Though disappointed, Lincoln knew that the 
struggle was only begun. The nation was 
aroused. Within a year the Republican party 
had suddenly sprung into being, there was 
bloodshed in Kansas, Sumner had been as- 
saulted in the Senate, and Lincoln watched the 
growing flame with interest and concern. 
When the first Republican State Convention 
met in Bloomington on May 29, 1856, there 

84 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

were cries all over the hall for "Lincoln! Lin- 
coln!" He went forward, and launched into a 
speech that so charmed and electrified his audi- 
ence that even the reporters sat spell-bound, 
forgetting to take it down. The burden of 
his utterance was, "Kansas shall be free!" and 
he concluded in a passage of highest spirit: 
"We will say to the Southern disunionists, we 
won't go out of the Union, and you 
SHAN'T!" 

He was done, at last, with the Whigs, and 
committed to the Republicans. But when he 
went back to Springfield, and he and Herndon 
had called a "mass" meeting, only one other be- 
sides himself and Herndon was present. Lin- 
coln spoke, nevertheless, dryly remarking that 
the meeting was larger than he knew it would 
be, for, while he had been sure that he and 
Herndon would attend, he had not been sure 
any one else would. And then he concluded : 
"While all seems dead, the age itself is not. 
It liveth as surely as our Maker liveth. Un- 
der all this seeming want of life and motion, the 

85 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

world does move, nevertheless. Be hopeful, 
and now let us adjourn and appeal to the 
people." 

Three weeks afterwards, in the Republican 
National Convention at Philadelphia, he re- 
ceived 110 votes for Vice-President, and, 
though he observed that "it must have been the 
great Lincoln of Massachusetts" they were vot- 
ing for, he was already known to the nation, 
and entered into the campaign as an elector for 
Fremont with such earnestness that, even 
though they lost in that campaign, his enthusi- 
astic friends at home said he was "already on 
the track for the presidency." 

With the contest of 1858 approaching, he 
was confident of success. The pro-slavery 
leaders of Kansas, by an unfair vote, forced 
the adoption of the Lecompton Constitution 
allowing slavery in that State, but, when Presi- 
dent Buchanan urged Congress to admit Kan- 
sas with this constitution, Douglas broke with 
the administration, opposed the Lecompton 
Constitution, and voted against the admission 

86 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

of Kansas. If this angered Buchanan and the 
South, it dehghted the Repubhcans. Many of 
them thought they saw a chance to gain a bril- 
liant and notable convert ; and Horace Greeley, 
editor of the New York Tribune, honest, well- 
meaning, blundering, urged the Republicans 
of Illinois to put up no candidate against 
Douglas. 

But Lincoln knew men and he knew politics 
better than Greeley, and, above all, he knew 
Douglas. The Illinois Republicans knew 
Douglas, too, and when they met at Spring- 
field, June 16, 1858, they resolved that "Hon. 
Abraham Lincoln is our first and only choice 
for United States Senator." Lincoln had 
been expecting the nomination, and he was 
ready. For weeks he had been pondering his 
speech of acceptance, jotting it down bit by bit, 
as it came to him in moments of inspiration, on 
scraps of paper, and, after his curious custom, 
bestowing them in his hat. At last he wrote 
it out and read it to a few friends, all of whom, 
except the radical Herndon, opposed his de- 

87 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

livering it in that form. But he was wiser 
than they, and remarking that, though he might 
have "to go down with it," he would "rather 
be defeated with that . . . speech than to be 
victorious without it," held to his own purpose 
and his own counsel. He delivered the speech 
in the Hall of the House of Representatives in 
Springfield the day after his nomination, and 
he stated the issue clearly, to the consterna- 
tion of friends and the delight of enemies, in 
his exordium: — 

"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Con- 
vention: — If we could first know where we are 
and whither we are tending, we could better 
judge what to do and how to do it. We are 
now far into the fifth year since a policy was 
initiated with the avowed object and confident 
purpose of putting an end to slavery agitation. 
Under the operation of that policy that agita- 
tion has not only not ceased, but has constantly 
augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease 
until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 
*A house divided against itself cannot stand.' 

88 



ABRAHAJNI LINCOLN 

I believe this government cannot endure, per- 
manently half-slave and half-free. I do not 
expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not 
expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will 
cease to be divided. It will become all one 
thing or all the other. Either the opponents 
of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, 
and place it where the public mind shall rest 
in the behef that it is in the course of ultimate 
extinction; or its advocates will push it for- 
ward till it shall become alike lawful in all the 
States, old as well as new. North as well as 
South." 

The speech, which really went no further 
than to advocate a return to the principle of 
the old Missouri Compromise, was regarded as 
radical, even revolutionary. Douglas replied 
to it on July 9 at Chicago, and found it full of 
difficulties, so compact was it of accurate his- 
tory and logical argument, but he could per- 
vert some of Lincoln's sayings into "abolition- 
ism," and he could express indignation at Lin- 
coln's disrespect for courts and lack of "rev- 

89 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

erence for the law," implied in his strictures on 
the Dred Scott decision. 

These speeches, in the picturesque phrase of 
Illinois politicians, "set the prairies on fire." 
After Lincoln had rejoined at Chicago and, 
a week later, Douglas had spoken at Bloom- 
ington and at Springfield, Lincoln replying on 
the evening of each day, it was evident that 
there was to be a battle of the giants. On 
July 24 Lincoln sent Douglas a challenge to 
meet him in a series of joint debates. If Lin- 
coln knew Douglas, Douglas knew Lincoln. 
"I shall have my hands full," he said to his 
friends. "He is the strong man of his party, 
— full of wit, facts, dates, — and the best stump 
speaker, with his droll wsljs and diy jokes, in 
the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, 
and, if I beat him, my victory will be hardly 
won." He was loath to accept. He had ex- 
pected to come home to an easy, triumphant 
campaign, in the warmth of approval for his 
really gallant stand against Buchanan: he did 
not wish, as he saw Lincoln had adroitly forced 

90 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

him to do, to discuss his own record, — the Dred 
Scott decision, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and 
the moral issue of slavery; and it was only 
human in him to be disappointed when he found 
himself confronted by such a task as Lincoln 
set for him. But the advantage was with him : 
he had the prestige of great success ; the power 
of money, which always supports the conserva- 
tive and aristocratic side, was with him ; and he 
had proved himself the equal in debate of Sew- 
ard, Chase, and Sumner. Then, too, he was 
rather unscrupulous in the use of his wonder- 
ful arts. No one realised more than Lincoln 
the apparent disparity. ''With me," he said, 
with that sad expression in his face, "the race 
of ambition has been a failure — a flat failure. 
With him it has been one of splendid success." 
Besides, he was slow in his mental processes: 
he used to talk to Herndon of "the long, la- 
boured movements" of his mind. But Doug- 
las accepted, and seven debates were set, — at 
Ottawa, August 21; Freeport, August 27; 
Jonesboro', September 15; Charleston, Sep- 

91 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

tember 18; Galesburg, October 7; Quincy, 
October 13; and Alton, October 15. 

In lofty spirit, Lincoln entered these de- 
bates, and the high course he took he held unto 
the end. Seeming to realise that he was the 
champion of the American ideal, he would 
stoop no lower, and the tone he adopted was 
kind, impersonal, and fair. It was a new thing 
in those days to eliminate bitter personalities 
from political discussion, but he did it, though 
he did not eliminate his humour and his droller- 
ies. "Think nothing of me," he said, conclud- 
ing an eloquent speech at Beardstown on 
August 12, the week before the formal debate 
began, "take no thought for the political fate 
of any man whomsoever, but come back to the 
truths that are in the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. You may do anything with me you 
choose, if you will but heed these sacred princi- 
ples. . . . While pretending no indifference to 
earthly honours, I do claim to be actuated in 
this contest by something higher than an anxi- 
ety for office. I charge you to drop every 

92 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

petty and insignificant thought for any man's 
success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge 
Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that 
immortal emblem of humanity — the Declara- 
tion of American Independence." 

Douglas began the debate with condescen- 
sion and affected tolerance. He travelled in 
state, accompanied by his beautiful wife, on 
special trains which the Illinois Central Rail- 
road provided. Everywhere he was received 
with ceremony. Salutes were fired, he was 
escorted royally to hotel and public square, 
where, in open air, the debates were held. The 
radicals then, as ever, had little money to ex- 
pend, and could not contrive such magnificent 
receptions for their long, lank champion ; and, 
if they could, he would not have liked them. 
Even when they did appear with banners and 
devices, and with floats in which girls in white 
rode in allegorical figures, he was embarrassed 
and distressed. He detested "fizzlegigs and 
fireworks," and, when at Ottawa his supporters 
grew so enthusiastic that they bore him from 

93 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the platform on their shoulders, he cried in dis- 
may, "Don't, boys; let me down; come now, 
don't." 

The crowds were enormous. There were 
fakirs vending ague cures, painkillers, water- 
melons and lemonade; jugglers and beggars; 
and bands from everywhere crashing out pa- 
triotic tunes. Hotels, boarding-houses, and 
livery stables were overflowing. At Ottawa 
thousands encamped along the bluff and on the 
bottom lands, and that night "the camp fires, 
spread up and down the valley for a mile, made 
it look as if an army were gathered about us." 
At Charleston a great delegation of men, 
women, and children in carriages, buggies, 
wagons, on foot and horseback, came from In- 
diana in a long caravan that wound over the 
prairie for miles, sending up a great cloud of 
dust. 

At Freeport Douglas misrepresented the in- 
cident at Ottawa, and taunted Lincoln with 
the charge that he was "so frightened by the 
questions put to him that he could not walk." 

94 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

But Lincoln bore this with his inexhaustible 
good humour, though it must have been mad- 
dening to have the adroit Douglas twist and 
turn his every utterance and lead him off con- 
stantly into irrelevancies and side issues. But 
these methods soon reacted. Almost in the 
beginning Douglas, in his efforts to fasten upon 
Lincoln the odium of abolitionism, charged him 
with having been a subscriber in 1856 to an 
abolition platform. The paper he read was 
soon proved to be a forgery. "The Little 
Dodger was cornered and caught," as the news- 
papers said ; and even Greeley came out against 
him, and wrote Herndon that Douglas was 
"like the man's boy who, he said, didn't weigh 
so much as he expected, and he always knew he 
wouldn't." All this served Lincoln's purpose 
well, and thereafter, whenever he had to quote a 
document, he paused long enough to explain 
with elaborate sarcasm that, "unless there was 
some mistake on the part of those with whom 
the document originated and which he had been 
unable to detect," it was authentic. 

95 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

He was able with more deadly effect to 
counter on those questions which Douglas 
charged had so frightened Lincoln that he had 
to be borne from the platform. For in the 
second debate at Freeport he put four ques- 
tions to Douglas, and in the third at Jonesboro' 
three others, on which, as events proved, the 
whole debate, and indeed, one might almost 
say, the fate of the nation itself, turned. Here 
was the lawyer again, the wily cross-examiner, 
the profound jurist, the clear-eyed statesman, 
who could look further into the future than any 
of them; for, as with the "house divided" 
speech, his friends urged him not to put the 
questions, especially the second, saying it would 
cost him the senatorship. But Lincoln was 
willing to risk that. "I am after larger game," 
he said; "the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred 
of this." 

The second question was this: "Can the 
people of a United States territory in any law- 
ful way, against the wish of any citizen of the 
United States, exclude slavery from its limits 

96 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

prior to the formation of a state constitution?" 
Lincoln believed that if Douglas, in applying 
his doctrine of popular sovereigntj^, should an- 
swer "no," he would lose Illinois and the sen- 
atorship ; if he answered "yes," he would alien- 
ate the South and lose the Presidency. And 
he was right. Douglas, in a remarkably adroit 
reply, answered "yes." His delighted follow- 
ers celebrated the manner in which he had es- 
caped "Lincoln's trap," and claimed the vic- 
tory already won. But, when the news reached 
the South, protests w^ere heard, and, as there 
the "Freeport doctrine" became known, so in- 
evitably Douglas's chances for 1860 waned. 
At Alton, in the last of the great engage- 
ments, when Douglas proclaimed himself the 
living representative of Henry Clay and of the 
true Whig policy, Lincoln replied that there 
was but one issue between them, — "Is slavery 
right or wrong?" And he closed in the same 
high spirit in which he had begun: — 

"It is the eternal struggle between these two 
principles — right and wrong — throughout the 

97 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

world. They are the two principles that have 
stood face to face from the beginning of time, 
and will ever continue to struggle. The one is 
the common right of humanity, and the other 
the divine right of kings. . . . Whenever the 
issue can be distinctly made and all extraneous 
matter thrown out, so that men can fairly see 
the real differences between the parties, this 
controversy will soon be settled, and it will be 
done peaceably, too." 

The fatigue of any campaign is great, even 
in these days of luxury and convenience in 
travel : in those it would seem to have been be- 
yond human endurance. The protagonists 
spoke nearly every day in the intervals between 
debates, and Lincoln, to whom the conserva- 
tives with their means were no more kind in 
that day than they would be in this, had to find 
rest when he could, often on the miserable rail- 
way coaches of those days, wrapped in his 
shawl. There were, besides, in this furious 
campaign many others speaking, — Chase, the 
red abolitionist of Ohio, Senator Trumbull, 

98 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Owen Love joy, Oglesby, and Palmer. The 
election was on November 2, and in the popular 
vote Lincoln had a plurality, the Republicans 
polling 126,084, the Douglas-Democrats 121,- 
940, and the Buchanan Democrats 5,091 votes. 
But, owing to the legislative apportionment, 
the Democrats carried a majority of the As- 
sembly districts, and there in January Douglas 
was re-elected senator, having 54 to Lincoln's 
46 votes. 

Of course, Lincoln was disappointed, but 
still he could joke. He felt "like the boy that 
stumped his toe — it hurt too bad to laugh, and 
he was too big to cry." But he was glad he 
made the race. "It gave me a hearing on the 
great and durable question of the age which I 
would have had in no other way; and though 
I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, 
I believe I have made some marks which will 
tell for the cause of civil liberty long after 
I am gone." But he was not to sink out of 
view. He received congratulations from all 
parts of the nation, and invitations to speak. 

99 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Most of the invitations he declined. His law 
practice had been neglected; the canvass had 
cost more money than he could afford ; he was 
"absolutely without money even for household 
expenses." To recoup his losses, he prepared 
a lecture on ''Discoveries, Inventions, and Im- 
provements" ; but soon reahsing that he was not 
a success outside the political field, and seeming 
to require a moral question to bring out his 
powers, he abandoned the lecture field almost 
immediately. But, when Douglas appeared 
in the gubernatorial campaign in Ohio in 1859, 
he could not resist the temptation to reply to 
his old antagonist, and he spoke in Columbus 
and in Cincinnati before tremendous audiences. 
In December he spoke in Kansas, and then ac- 
cepted an invitation to deliver an address, 
February 27, 1860, at Cooper Institute in New 
York. 

It was a notable speech, delivered before a 
distinguished audience, presided over by Wil- 
liam Cullen Bryant. Lincoln was at first un- 
comfortable and embarrassed: he ''imagined 

100 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

that the audience noticed the contrast between 
his Western clothes and the neat-fitting suit 
of Mr. Bryant and others who sat on the plat- 
form." But Horace Greeley said next day in 
the Tribune J "No man ever made such an im- 
pression in his first appeal to a New York 
audience." 

From New York he went to New England. 
His speeches there were not so formal as the 
Cooper Institute address, but they made as 
deep an impression, and he went home with a 
national reputation. Men were inquiring 
about him. The strange story of his life ap- 
pealed to the imagination of the North, and 
his Illinois friends urged him to let them set 
about the work so congenial to them. "What's 
the use of talking about me whilst we have 
such men as Seward, Chase, and others?" he 
said to Jesse Fell, who sought data for a biog- 
raphy. Fell pleaded. At last Lincoln rose, 
wrapped his old grey shawl about him : "Fell, 
I admit that I am ambitious and would like to 
be President. I am not insensible to the com^ 

101 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

pliment you pay me and the interest you mani- 
fest in the matter, but there is no such good luck 
in store for me as the Presidency of these 
United States. Besides, there is nothing in 
my early history that would interest you or 
anybody else." But Davis, Swett, Logan, 
Palmer — the lawyers who had known him on 
the circuit, and loved him — urged the more be- 
cause of their love. At last he consented, and 
was quietly occupied during the spring with 
that wire-pulling at which he was so adept. 
He went, as a spectator, to the State Conven- 
tion at Decatur on JMay 9, and when a banner 
was borne in, inscribed "Abraham Lincoln, the 
Rail Candidate for President in 1860," sup- 
ported by two well-weathered fence rails dec- 
orated with ribbons, "from a lot of 3,000 made 
by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the 
Sangamon Bottom, in the year 1830," the con- 
vention went wild. Lincoln, of course, made 
a speech, and the State delegation was in- 
structed to "use all honourable means" to se- 
cure his nomination. 

102 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

The National Convention met in Chicago a 
week later, and Davis, Swett, Judd, Palmer, 
Logan, and Oglesby were there. The town 
was filled with a turbulent crowd. Processions 
trailed in the streets all night, shouting for the 
several candidates. But night and day, with- 
out rest, without sleep, Lincoln's friends 
worked, — "like nailers," as Oglesby said. 
Surely, they left nothing undone, even to dis- 
regarding Lincoln's own expressed wishes, and 
entering into a bargain with Simon Cameron, 
of Pennsylvania, which was to plague Lincoln 
later. Cameron was Pennsylvania's candi- 
date, as Chase was Ohio's, and Seward New 
York's. Indeed, Seward, who in his "higher 
law" and ''irrepressible conflict" utterances had 
taken ground as advanced as Lincoln, was by 
all considered as sure of the nomination. But 
so well did the friends of Lincoln work that on 
May 16, on the third ballot, he received 2311/2 
votes, Seward 180, with 53% scattering, and 
he was nominated. At the announcement of 
the result a frenzied partisan shouted: "Hal- 

103 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

lelujah! Abe Lincoln's nominated!" and a 
cannon boomed from the top of the huge wig- 
wam in which the convention assembled, but 
the convention could not hear it for the amazing 
demonstration the delegates made, — a demon- 
stration that spread outside, literally all over 
Illinois. 

Meanwhile, down in Springfield, with rising 
and falling hopes, now confident, now plunged 
in his constitutional melancholy, Lincoln was 
waiting. When the news came, he was found 
playing handball. Looking at the telegram a 
moment, he said, "There is a little woman down 
on Eighth Street who will be glad to hear this 
news," and strode away to tell her. 

And down in Washington Douglas was say- 
ing, "There won't be a tar barrel left in Illinois 
to-night." 

The notification, so great a ceremony in these 
days, was prompt and simple. A day later, 
in the evening, the committee was received by 
Lincoln in the parlour of his home. The com- 
mittee had its own misgivings, which the tall, 

104 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

gaunt figure, with its drooping shoulders, 
standing awkwardly and with downcast eyes on 
the hearthstone, did not do much to reassure, 
until he began to speak. Then the bronze face 
caught a new hght from the grey eyes, through 
which the great soul looked out upon the com- 
mittee, and an hour later the distinguished gen- 
tlemen departed, all delighted. 

The Democrats, splitting at Charleston, had 
adjourned to Baltimore and nominated Doug- 
las and Johnson. The bolters nominated 
Breckenridge and Lane. There was a fourth 
ticket. Bell and Everett, representing the 
^'Constitutional Union" party. Douglas made 
a vigorous canvass, but that second question 
Lincoln had put to him in the Freeport debate 
would not down. The radical Southerners 
would none of him, but supported Brecken- 
ridge. 

During the campaign Lincoln remained 
quietly in Springfield. The governor's rooms 
in the State House were placed at his disposal, 
and here he met his callers, talked and joked 

105 



ABRAHAJ^I LINCOLN 

and whispered with them, was skilful, wary, 
and discreet in all he said and in the very little 
he wrote, and, when embarrassing questions 
were asked, he told a story or had the private 
secretary he had newly installed make a stereo- 
typed reply, referring to his record and his 
speeches. The abolitionists, of course, were no 
more satisfied with him than the radicals of 
any cause ever are with their representatives 
when the cause arrives, though Chase supported 
him, and Seward, with a sincerity that pleased 
him. Perhaps nothing more distressed him 
than the attitude of the Springfield preachers. 
Of the twenty- three in the town, twenty were 
against him. "These men well know," he said, 
"that I am for freedom, and yet with this 
book," indicating the New Testament, "in their 
hands, in the light of which human bondage 
cannot live a moment, they are going to vote 
against me. I do not understand it at all." 
In November he received a total popular vote 
of 1,866,452, and 180 electoral votes, all of the 
eighteen Northern States except New Jersey, 

106 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

which gave part of her vote to Douglas. The 
Little Giant polled 1,375,157 votes, but in the 
electoral college had but 12 votes, three in New 
Jersey and nine in Missouri. Breckenridge 
had 72 electoral votes, carrying all the Southern 
States except Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennes- 
see, which gave their 39 electoral votes to Bell. 
Four days after the election the South began 
to execute its threat of secession. The South 
Carolina senators resigned, by Christmas the 
palmetto flag floated over every federal build- 
ing in that State, and early in January the 
South Carolinians had fired on the Star of the 
West as she entered Charleston harbour with 
supphes for Fort Sumter. Meanwhile Lin- 
coln had to wait in Springfield while the great 
conspiracy matured, while the impotent 
Buchanan let the very government slip from 
his weak hands, while Greeley aided the disin- 
tegration of the nation by his silly editorials, 
while men w^ere for peace at any price, even 
Seward anxious for compromise, and the busi- 
ness interests of the East, timid as ever, for 

107 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

anything that would save thek sacred stock 
market. By February, seven of the Southern 
States — South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, 
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas — 
had declared themselves out of the Union and 
formed the Confederate States of America, 
with Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, as Presi- 
dent, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, 
Vice-President. 

Well might Lincoln appear "more distracted 
and absent-minded" and ''sorrowful unto 
death," with a "preternatural expression of ex- 
quisite grief" in his eyes; well might he say, "I 
shall never be glad any more." But, if sad, he 
was calm during this trying interregnum, and 
did not take seriously the coarse editorials in 
Southern newspapers, referring to him as 
"Lincoln, the beast," the "Illinois ape," etc. 
He was at work on his inaugural address, and 
at the same time troubled with his cabinet ap- 
pointments. The trade Judge Davis had 
made at Chicago with Cameron, the political 
boss of Pennsylvania, already plagued him. 

108 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

But the time passed at last; and, after a pil- 
grimage to the grave of his father in Coles 
County and a visit to his stepmother, early on 
Monday morning, February 11, he left Spring- 
field for Washington. His old friends and 
neighbours went down to the railway station to 
see him oif, and stood patiently, bareheaded in 
the rain, while, with tears streaming down his 
dark cheeks, he made his touching little fare- 
well speech from the platform of the coach: — 
"My friends, no one, not in my situation, can 
appreciate my feeling of sadness at this part- 
ing. To this place, and the kindness of these 
people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a 
quarter of a century and have passed from a 
young to an old man. Here my children have 
been born and one is buried. I now leave, not 
knowing when or whether ever I may return, 
with a task before me greater than that which 
rested upon Washington. Without the assist- 
ance of that Divine Being who ever attended 
him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, 
I cannot fail. Trusting to Him who can go 

109 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

with me, and remain with you, and be every- 
where for good, let us confidently hope that all 
will yet be well. To His care commending 
you, as I hope in your prayers you will com- 
mend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell." 
On the way he stopped at Indianapolis, Cin- 
cinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Buffalo, Al- 
bany, and New York, and everywhere to the 
waiting crowds made short, informal ad- 
dresses, warily avoiding any announcement of 
policy. At Philadelphia on Washington's 
Birthday, in celebration of the admission of 
Kansas as a free State, he raised a new flag of 
thirty- four stars over Independence Hall. He 
was deeply moved, and spoke fervently of 
"that sentiment in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence which gives liberty not alone to the 
people of this country, but hope to all the world 
for all future times; . . . which gave promise 
that in due time the weights would be lifted 
from the shoulders of all men, and that all 
should have an equal chance." And then "If 
this country cannot be saved without giving up 

110 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

that principle, I was about to say I would 
rather be assassinated on this spot than surren- 
der it." 

This reference to assassination was signifi- 
cant. Detectives claimed to have discovered a 
plot to kill him as he passed through Baltimore. 
He insisted on fulfilling his engagement to ad- 
dress the legislature at Harrisburg, then con- 
sented to go on that night, incognito. The 
next morning the country heard that he was 
safe in the capital. Even then and the nine 
succeeding days, men were betting in hotel cor- 
ridors that he would never be inaugurated. 
Those were trying days. The office-seekers, 
willing to take the chance of assassination, had 
already begun their descent upon him. 

Inauguration Day, March 4, 1861, dawned 
in brilliant sunshine. At noon President 
Buchanan, "far advanced in years, in low- 
crowned, broad-brimmed silk hat, an immense 
white cravat, with swallow-tail coat not of the 
newest style," waited on Lincoln to escort him 
to the Capitol and place upon the strong shoul- 

111 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ders of the great Westerner the burden which 
had been too heavy for the infirm old diplomat. 
They drove together down Pennsylvania Ave- 
nue. The ceremonies were held in the eastern 
portico of the new Capitol, and on the tempo- 
rary platform distinguished officialdom had 
gathered. The crowd, small because of the 
rumour of tragedy, — old Winfield Scott had 
posted troops, and was ready, "if any of them 
show their heads or raise a finger," to "blow 
them to hell," — awaited in unsympathetic si- 
lence. Lincoln, attired in new clothes, his so- 
ber face changed by the beard that had not yet 
grown sufficiently to justify the predictions of 
the little girl who had naively advised it, was 
plainly embarrassed, and stood for an awkward 
moment holding in one hand his high hat and in 
the other a large gold-headed ebony stick. 
But Douglas, his old rival, was there, and, step- 
ping promptly forward, relieved him of hat 
and cane and held them for him, — a graceful 
incident, the significance of which was not lost. 
The ceremonies were brief. Edward D. 

112 



I 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Baker, dearest of old Springfield friends, now 
senator from Oregon, formally presented him, 
and, after he had read his inaugural address, 
the aged Chief Justice Taney, who had written 
the Dred Scott decision, in his black robes ad- 
ministered the oath to the new President, who 
was forever to overthrow the doctrine on which 
that decision was based. 

He read his address, so long and eagerly 
awaited, read it distinctly, so that all could hear, 
— hear him say that misunderstandings had 
caused differences, disavow any intention to 
interfere with the existing privilege of slavery, 
and even declare himself in favour of a new 
fugitive slave law. But he was firm. "The 
Union of these States is perpetual," he said, 
and "no State, upon its own mere motion, can 
lawfully get out of the Union." "I shall take 
care, as the Constitution itself expressly en- 
joins upon me, that the laws of the Union be 
faithfully executed in all the States," and he 
was determined "to hold, occupy, and possess 
the property and places belonging to the Gov- 

113 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ernment and to collect the duties and imposts." 
And he closed with the beautiful passage, 
founded upon Seward's suggestion: "I am 
loath to close. We are not enemies, but 
friends. We must not be enemies. Though 
passion may have strained, it must not break 
our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of 
memory, stretching from every battlefield and 
patriot grave to every living heart and hearth- 
stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the 
chorus of the Union when again touched, as 
surely they will be, by the better angels of our 
nature." 



114 



IV 

When Lincoln drove from his inaugural to 
the White House, it was, indeed, to face a task 
greater than that which rested upon Washing- 
ton, as great surely as ever rested on any man. 
He realised his task fully, but his way, he said, 
was "plain as a turnpike road." He was, first 
of all, tormented by the office-seekers, so ter- 
rible an affliction to every executive in these 
States, and in bitterness he said, "This human 
struggle and scramble for office will finally test 
the strength of our institutions." But the dif- 
ficulties of cabinet making at least were done, 
and the next day he sent to the Senate these 
names: Wilham H. Seward, Secretary of 
State; Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the 
Treasury; Simon Cameron, Secretary of War; 
Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy; Caleb 
B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior; Edward 

115 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Bates, Attorney-General; and Montgomery 
Blair, Postmaster-General. 

That same day, the very first thing, the 
whole issue was presented to him in a letter 
from Major Anderson, with his little band, 
hungry in Fort Sumter. He wanted pro- 
visions. The place could be held only by 
20,000 disciplined troops. The army num- 
bered but 16,000 men. What was he to do? 
General Scott said "evacuation." Lincoln re- 
plied, "When Anderson goes out of Fort Sum- 
ter, I shall have to go out of the White 
House." While he pondered, the country 
clamoured. Congress demanded the Ander- 
son correspondence, which he refused, his mil- 
itary advisers differed, his cabinet differed. 
The days went by. Meanwhile Seward, cheer- 
fully joining in the assumption that he, and 
not Lincoln, was the man of the hour, had 
taken it upon himself to assure the Confed- 
erate Commissioners, then in Washington, that 
Sumter would be evacuated. When he 
learned that Lincoln had decided otherwise, he 

116 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

laid before him, on April 1, ''Some Thoughts 
for the President's Consideration," in which, 
after complaining of the *'lack of policy," he 
proposed to make war on Spain and France, 
to "seek explanations from Great Britain and 
Russia," and suggested that the direction of 
this policy be devolved by the President "on 
some member of his cabinet," concluding with 
modest significance, "It is not in my especial 
province ; but I neither seek to evade or assume 
responsibility." This astounding proposal 
Lincoln received in his kind, magnanimous 
spirit. "As to the pohcy, I remark that if this 
must be done, I must do it. . . . When a gen- 
eral line of pohcy is adopted, I apprehend 
there is no danger of its being changed without 
good reason, or continuing to be a subject of 
unnecessary debate; still, upon points arising 
in its progress I wish, and suppose I am en- 
titled to have, the advice of all the cabinet." 
Thus Seward learned, as the nation was to 
learn, who was master, and how great and 
wise and capable he was, and two months later 

117 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Seward acknowledged the superiority. "Ex- 
ecutive force and vigour are rare qualities," he 
wrote ; "the President is the best of us." 

A few days later the relief for Fort Sumter 
sailed from New York harbour. The Presi- 
dent had scrupulously notified the Governor 
of South Carolina that the relief would be at- 
tempted, but by a blunder of the President's 
own the warship Powhatan was sent to Fort 
Pickens instead. When the news that the ex- 
pedition had sailed reached Charleston, Beau- 
regard demanded surrender, and then gave the 
order to reduce the fort. On April 12 the 
bombardment began, as Anderson and his men 
were eating the very last of their rations. 
They fought gallantly, but on the morning of 
the 13th their guns were silenced. All the 
time the three transports of the relief expe- 
dition had been lying outside the bar, awaiting 
the Powhatan. With her assistance the fort 
could have been relieved, for the night was 
very dark. It was a grievous blunder, for 
which Lincoln assumed the whole responsibil- 

118 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

ity. It is a question for debate what history 
would have been, had this blunder not oc- 
curred, — one of those perhaps useless questions 
which never can be answered. Lincoln has 
been criticised for having delayed so long, but 
miltary advisers had told him that evacuation 
was inevitable, his cabinet was against the at- 
tempt, public opinion was compromising and 
opposed to any overt act. But, whatever the 
result otherwise might have been, the effect 
was instantaneous. The whole North arose, 
a unity at last in its mighty wrath. Douglas 
promptly assured the President of his support, 
and telegraphed his followers that he had given 
his pledge to ''sustain the President in the ex- 
ercise of all his constitutional functions to pre- 
serve the Union and maintain the government, 
and defend the Federal Capital." No more 
talk of compromise or concession, nor more dis- 
cussion of the right or WTong of slavery. Lin- 
coln, for that issue, had substituted the issue 
of Union, and he had forced the Confederacy 
into the position of aggressor. On the 15th 

119 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

came his proclamation calling for 75,000 vol- 
unteers and convening Congress in extra ses- 
sion for July 4. The response was electrical. 
Hundi^ds of thousands of men all over the 
North offered themselves in the Union cause, 
glad that the long anxiety was over. This 
temper was not softened when, on April 19, 
the Sixth Massachusetts was assaulted in the 
streets of Baltimore. Twelve rioters and four 
soldiers were killed, and many wounded. It 
was a trying time. All about the little Dis- 
trict of Columbia lay Maryland, full of seces- 
sion sentiment, protesting against the passage 
of any more troops through Baltimore. 
There was great danger of the capture of 
Washington, and with the capital in its hands 
the Confederacy would be certain of European 
recognition. At the White House they could 
get no news. The wires to the North had been 
cut, and Lincoln, awaiting the Seventh New 
York, groaned: "Why don't they come! 
Why don't they come!" 

In this crisis, if, as alv/ays, conciliatory, he 
120 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

was fil'm. If troops could not march through 
Baltimore, they could march around it; and, 
when there were protests against the troops 
crossing the **sacred" soil of Maryland, he re- 
plied that his soldiers could neither fly over the 
State nor burrow under it, and that jMaryland 
must learn that "there was no piece of Ameri- 
can soil too good to be pressed by the foot of a 
loyal soldier as he marched to the defence of 
the capital of his country." Gradually, senti- 
ment in Maryland changed, especially when 
business in Baltimore was affected; and, when 
soldiers enough arrived in Washington to in- 
sure the defence of the capital, union sentiment 
in Maryland was stimulated and grew until the 
end of the war, keeping her in the Union. 

And now, while visiting the camps about 
Washington, consulting with officers, hobnob- 
bing with private soldiers in his simple West- 
ern way, joking, listening to queries and com- 
plaints, gaining that personal love which they 
bore him through the whole war, Lincoln was 
constantly brooding over his mighty problem. 

121 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

His task just then was to prevent further de- 
fections from the Union, to prevent European 
recognition of the Confederacy, and to create 
an army and navy that could reassert the 
national power throughout the States in re- 
bellion. Slowly, cautiously, patiently, with 
many blunders and mistakes, in the midst of 
misunderstanding, noisy criticism, and malig- 
nant abuse, he made his way. It was a tri- 
umph of diplomacy that he prevented Ken- 
tucky from following Virginia in secession; 
and, while he was not so successful with other 
States, — for, by June, Arkansas, North Caro- 
lina, and Tennessee had joined the Confed- 
eracy, — he did save not only Kentucky, but 
Missouri. The secession of Virginia was a 
disastrous blow. The capital of the Confed- 
eracy was removed to Richmond, and the Old 
Dominion gave its great son, Robert E. Lee, 
to command the Southern army, and for four 
years the stars and bars were to fly in defiance, 
almost in the President's face, from the hills 
across the Potomac. 

122 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

With growing mastery President Lincoln 
watched over men and events, tempered with 
his kindliness and caution Seward's diplomac}^ 
studied the science of war while the army and 
navy were being organised; and driven in 
April to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, 
thereby, on the one hand, bringing down on his 
head the criticism that he was a dictator and 
usurper, and, on the other, that he was not 
tyrannical enough, he was ready, when Con- 
gress convened on the Fourth of July, to give 
to it and to the people his reasons for the 
course he was following. The army was 
anxious to move, the North was clamouring, 
and Lincoln decided to seize Arlington 
Heights across the Potomac. On May 23 the 
movement began, the Heights were occupied, 
the enemy fled, the flag was lowered, but it cost 
the life of young Ellsworth, a dashing com- 
mander of Zouaves whom Lincoln had known 
and loved back at Springfield. Then for 
weeks the army lay inactive, while the North, 
led by Greeley, cried, "On to Richmond!" 

123 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

The enemy had intrenched at Manassas Junc- 
tion, and General Scott opposed an advance, 
saying that the army was not ready; but Lin- 
coln, nevertheless, ordered the movement. 
There were delays, but at last, on July 21, 
McDowell was ready to attack Beauregard- 
It was a hot Sunday of brilliant sunshine, and 
by afternoon reports were so encouraging that 
Lincoln went for a drive; but that night with 
his cabinet and General Scott in the telegraph 
office, where he was to spend so many anxious 
hours during the rest of his life, there came the 
report from McDowell, *'Our army is retreat- 
ing," and soon he knew of the fost great dis- 
aster of Bull Run. At dawn, in a drizzling 
rain, demoralised troops began to pour into 
Washington over Long Bridge. If the blow 
staggered the North, it sobered and steadied 
it. The nation realised that it was in a real 
war, and it set itself, with grim determination, 
to the great task. Congress voted men and 
money, and Lincoln called to the command of 
the Army of the Potomac the young general, 

124 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

George B. McClellan, who had been winning 
successes in Western Virginia, and electrify- 
ing the North by Napoleonic despatches. 
These despatches, his youth, and his dash had 
made him popular. He was a man of engag- 
ing personality, an efficient organiser and engi- 
neer, though Lincoln was soon to remark that 
his especial talent was as a stationary engineer. 
McClellan came in the brilliant style in which 
he always moved, and out of the remnants of 
the militia who had fled from Bull Run and out 
of the new volunteers pouring into camp — in- 
telligent artisans of the North, hardy farmers 
of the West, come to fight for principle — he 
proceeded to create one of the finest armies in 
history. 

Fremont, in command in the West, took it 
upon himself that fall to issue a proclamation 
emancipating the slaves of non-Union men in 
Missouri. If the act pleased the abolitionists, 
it created consternation in the Border States 
and added to Lincoln's burden. He revoked 
the proclamation, of course, and thereby saved 

125 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland to the 
Union. The abolitionists, mightily offended, 
talked of impeachment. They saw the moral 
issue of slavery rather than the political issue 
of union ; and the clamour, led by Greeley, was 
long and loud. The troubles in Missouri were 
long to exasperate the patient man in the 
White House. It was the beginning of that 
period, destined to last so long, when he was 
constantly distressed by the childish piques and 
prides of his generals, who, considering them- 
selves competent to command armies, could not 
even command themselves. But his patience 
never was exhausted, — not even by the imperti- 
nence of Buell, who failed to move into east- 
ern Tennessee and stop the depredations of 
Confederate soldiers who were harrying and 
even hanging the loyal residents. But there 
was one general who was not so, — Grant in the 
West, taking Fort Henry, then Donelson, and 
in February, 1862, sending his famous des- 
patch to Buckner: *'No terms except uncon- 
ditional and immediate surrender. I propose 

126 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

to move immediately upon your works." 
What balm to that weary spirit! They urged 
him, of course, to remove Grant; but "this man 
fights," he said. Then the "good" people told 
him that Grant drank. *'Do you Imow what 
brand of whiskey ?" he asked. ''I'd like to send 
a barrel to each of my other generals." But it 
was too soon for Grant. There were yet 
long months of IMcClellan and his successors, 
and the only victories worth while were that of 
the Monitor over the Merrimac, March 9, 
1862, and the capture of New Orleans in 
April. 

McClellan, meanwhile, had been organising 
and intrenching his 168,000 men. Lincoln 
watched him intently, intelligently, and with 
the sympathy of a father, visiting him at his 
headquarters, giving him all he asked, but all 
his solicitude and kindness were lost. To 
JMcClellan the President's friendly visits were 
merely "interruptions" of his tremendous 
thoughts and large schemes; the cabinet were 
"the greatest geese" ; and, being obliged to at- 

127 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

tend their meeting, he was ''bored and an- 
noyed." But the President and the country 
were patient. The people had learned a lesson 
from Bull Run, and were no longer crying, 
"On to Richmond!" Every day there were 
guard-mounts and parades, and now and then 
reviews, brilliant military spectacles wherein 
McClellan excelled, which all Washington 
went out to see. It was a gay holiday time for 
every one but Lincoln, for whom there never 
was gayety and were never more to be holi- 
days. 

But when the autumn moved by, with its 
glorious weather, and nothing was done, the 
muttering began and increased to wrath and 
new dismay by the end of October, when on the 
21st the blunder of Ball's Bluff occurred. 
Lincoln was at JMcClellan's headquarters when 
the news came from up the Potomac that his 
old friend. Colonel Edward D. Baker, had 
been killed. It was a terrible blow. C. C. 
Coffin saw him, "unattended, with bowed head 
and tears rolling down his furrowed cheeks, his 

128 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

face pale and wan, his breast heaving with emo- 
tion," pass through the room. ''With both 
hands pressed upon his heart, he walked down 
the street, not returning the salute of the senti- 
nel pacing his beat before the door." The 
fault here was not McClellan's, and, though 
the nation grumbled, Lincoln had not lost faith 
in him, and when on October 31 the aged Gen- 
eral Scott, who had won his spurs nearly half a 
century before at Lundy's Lane, retired, he 
raised JNIcClellan to the post of commander-in- 
chief, under the President, of the armies of the 
United States. 

But now for a space he was to be distracted 
from the concern McClellan's immobility 
caused him by another difficulty, which for a 
time seemed likely to plunge the nation into 
war with England. On November 8 Captain 
Wilkes, commanding the warship San Jacinto^ 
overhauled the British royal mail packet 
Trent, one day out from Havana, brought her 
to by a shot across her bows, and took from her 
Mason and Shdell, commissioners from the 

129 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Confederacy on their way to Europe. When 
the news was made pubhc, the nation was in 
a high state of jubilation. But Lincoln saw 
the mistake; he feared the captured commis- 
sioners would *'prove to be white elephants." 
If there were bluster and jingoism in England, 
so there were in America, and public sentiment 
favoured the keeping of the commissioners and 
braving another war. Of this feeling Seward 
himself partook, and Lincoln took upon him- 
self the burden of diplomacy, and by his kind- 
ness moderated the too offensive tone Seward 
was apt to adopt in his dealings with Lord 
Palmerston. He had, however, by his ex- 
quisite tact and almost preternatural knowl- 
edge of men, won to his side the proud and rad- 
ical Sumner, chairman of the Senate Commit- 
tee on Foreign Relations, and, though as Lin- 
coln said slyly, "Sumner thinks he runs me," 
he really "ran" Sumner. While the country 
raged, Lincoln kept silent. Sumner was in 
correspondence with Cobden and with Bright, 
whose portrait hung in the President's execu- 

130 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

tive chamber, struggling for the people's cause 
in England as Lincoln was in America. The 
British ultimatum, demanding immediate resti- 
tution and apology, was presented, and on 
Christmas morning Lincoln convened his cab- 
inet. Sumner was present with urgent letters 
from Bright and Cobden, speaking of "your 
country, the great hope of humanity," and 
urging a "courageous stroke" to save "you and 
us." Lincoln was ready for the courageous 
stroke. Mason and SHdell were released, war 
was averted, and sentiment in England was so 
softened and appeased that John Stuart Mill 
doubtless reflected the best of it when he wrote, 
"Is there any one capable of a moral judgment 
or feeling who will say that his opinion of 
America and American statesmen is not raised 
by such an act done on such grounds?" 

Lincoln had made no reference to this crit- 
ical affair in his message to Congress in De- 
cember: he knew how to keep silence just as 
he knew how to explain; but there was in that 
message a splendid paragraph expressing his 

131 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

views on the labour question, — a paragraph 
which shows that, if he were not a poHtical 
economist, he was, what is greater, a lover of 
humanity, and knew instinctively that the 
cause of the workers of the world was the cause 
of democracy everywhere, and that the war he 
was in was a war in that cause. 

*'Labour," he said, *'is prior to and independ- 
ent of Capital. Capital is only the fruit of 
Labour, and could never have existed if La- 
bour had not first existed. Labour is the su- 
perior of Capital, and deserves much the higher 
consideration. Capital has its rights, which 
are as worthy of protection as any other rights. 
Nor is it denied that there is, and probably 
alwaj^s will be, a relation between Capital and 
Labour producing mutual benefit. The error 
is in assuming that the whole Labour of a com- 
munity exists within that relation. A few 
men own Capital, and that few avoid Labour 
themselves, and with their capital hire or buy 
another few to labour for them. A large ma- 
jority belong to neither class — neither work 

132 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

for others, nor have others working for them. 
. . . Many independent men everywhere in 
these states, a few years back in their lives, 
were hired labourers. The prudent, penniless 
beginner in the world labours for wages awhile, 
saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land 
for himself, then labours on his own account 
another while, and at length hires another new 
beginner to help him. This is the generous 
and just and prosperous system which opens 
the way to all — gives hope to all, and conse- 
quent energy and progress and improvement 
of condition to all. No men living are more 
worthy to be trusted than those who toil up 
from poverty — none less inclined to take or 
touch aught which they have not honestly 
earned. Let them beware of surrendering a 
political power which they already possess, 
and which, if surrendered, will surely be used 
to close the door of advancement against such 
as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens 
upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost." 
Far as he could see into the future, he could 
133 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

not foresee the great change which, with eco- 
nomic evolution, was to come over America 
and the world, — a change that would sweep 
away the individualistic system which, in the 
beginning, the fathers had admirably met in 
theii' political constitution, — ^the system which 
he hoped to perfect. Perhaps he confused 
then, as most do to-day, political liberty with 
economic liberty; but he had before him the 
great ideal of equality of opportunity so beau- 
tifully imagined in the immortal Declaration, 
and so constantly before the mind of our ideal- 
ist, whose dream and passion it became. In 
that war this superiority, the right of man as 
against the right of property, was at stake, and 
in a sense it was fortunate that the rights of 
property were then contended for by a com- 
pact section rather than by capitalists scattered 
everywhere, by a class easily recognised rather 
than by one that merged its identity in the 
whole mass of the people, for it made the issue 
clear. 

But the cause was being carried forward 
134 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

with tremendous difficulty, and almost, one 
might say, by Lincoln alone. 

The trouble he had feared from his redemp- 
tion of Davis's unauthorised promise to Cam- 
eron at Chicago had been present for some 
time: if Cameron was not all he should be in 
the War Office, he was exactly what Lincoln 
had expected him to be, and January 11, 1862, 
Lincoln offered him the post of minister to 
Russia. Cameron accepted, and on the 13th 
Lincoln appointed Edwin M. Stanton Sec- 
retary of War. Stanton was a Democrat, a 
friend of McClellan, and had never ceased, it 
seems, to speak of Lincoln with that gross abuse 
with which he had greeted him in the McCor- 
mick case at Cincinnati in 1859. But, with 
all his revilings and insults, he did not hesitate 
promptly to accept, as a man of finer nature 
might have done, though a man of finer na- 
ture would, of course, never have been so in- 
solent as Stanton was. But if he was insolent, 
truculent, and brow-beating, with all the petty 
tyrannies and injustices of the bully, and if 

135 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

he often sorely tried the patient President, he 
was an honest man who broke the ring of con- 
tractors, and he was a prodigious worker. 
And he soon learned — as Seward had learned 
and as McClellan was about to learn — that 
Lincoln was master; and, though it was im- 
possible that he should do it gracefully, as 
Seward did, he recognised that mastery and 
superiority. The appointment of Stanton is 
but another of many instances of Lincoln's 
ability to rise above all personal feelings and 
considerations. He had no thought for him- 
self, for his personal or political fortune: he 
was wholly absorbed in the great cause. He 
needed men, and he took them whenever and 
wherever he could get them, no matter who 
they were. Surely, he dwelt at high spiritual 
altitudes ! 

Meanv/hile, for six months, McClellan had 
been preparing to advance; but there was no 
advance. With American humour the North 
accepted the daily bulletins, until "All quiet 
along the Potomac" passed into the fixities of 

136 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

common speech. The President met the sit- 
uation with his almost divine patience, and, 
though in distress, that humour which lay so 
near the sadness in his nature, as it does in all 
great natures, came to his relief, and epito- 
mised the situation in his observation "that if 
General JMcClellan did not want to use the 
army, he would like to borrow it." He had 
recognised his own want of knowledge of the 
art of war, if it is an art, and in McClellan 
he reposed a confidence which it was not ^Ic- 
Clellan's nature to appreciate. In December 
he had ventured to ask JMcClellan, "if it was 
determined to make a forward movement of 
the Ai^my of the Potomac, . . . how long 
would it require to actually get it in motion?" 
And to this, after waiting ten days, JMcClellan 
returned a disrespectful reply. Then JMc- 
Clellan fell ill. The President was in despair. 
But he undertook the study of the military 
problem himself, and by the time JMcClellan 
recovered, in January, he had a j^lan which he 
proposed; namely, to move directly upon the 

137 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

enemy at Centreville and Manassas, and to 
press him back upon Richmond, in order to 
capture that city, McClellan's plan was to 
move by way of XJrbana and West Point, 
using the York River as a base. Upon the 
relative merits of the two plans a difference 
arose that continues to this day. There was 
a long discussion between Lincoln and his re- 
calcitrant general, which lengthened the de- 
lay. The North divided into factions, the one 
accusing "The Virginia Creeper" — the nick- 
name with which American humour inevitably 
provided him — of disloyalty, the other criticis- 
ing Lincoln for his civilian interference with 
the inscrutable science of war. But Lincoln, 
unmoved by McClellan's conduct or by politi- 
cal clangour, in his "General War Order No. 
1" directed that February 22, 1862, "be the 
day for a general movement of the land and 
naval forces of the United States against the 
insurgent forces." The critics laughed, but 
Lincoln had, as always, his own purpose. On 
January 31 he ordered McClellan to seize and 

138 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

occupy a point near Manassas Junction, and 
this forced the issue. McClellan remon- 
strated, and then began that long exchange 
of letters and despatches which, better than 
other words can do, reveals the characters of 
the two men. Lincoln was all patience, kind- 
ness, humour: McClellan was querulous, petty, 
and sometimes positively insulting. Wash- 
ington's birthday came: McClellan did not 
move. By March Johnston had evacuated 
Manassas. Then the President relieved Mc- 
Clellan of command, though he retained him 
at the head of the Army of the Potomac. 

Those were dark days. The burden Lin- 
coln bore so patiently was tremendous, and 
was made wearier by the advice which was so 
copiously tendered him. Abuse and criticism 
he could endure: the newspapers he did not 
often read, for, as he said, "I know more about 
it than they do"; but he could not escape ad- 
vice. Besides the daily calls of senators and 
representatives. Congress had created a Com- 
mittee on the Conduct of the War, and the 

139 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

politicians who composed that inquisitorial 
body could jauntily dispose of the most intri- 
cate military problems in the midst of their 
political schemes, and Lincoln had to surrender 
useful time and employ the greatest tact with 
them. The newspapers and the pulpits in the 
churches were full of counsel, — and of abuse 
because it was not heeded, — and there were, of 
course, delegations of clergymen and of bank- 
ers. "Money!" he exclaimed one day when 
Chase, whom he allowed to manage the finances 
in his own way, wished to present a delegation 
of financiers, — "money! I don't know any- 
thing about money! I never had enough of 
my own to fret me, and I have no opinion about 
it, anyway." And he bore it all X)atientl3% even 
meekly, and went on his high, lonely way. 

Besides all this, there were sombre shadows 
in the private chambers of the White House. 
Willie and Tad were ill with the typhoid fever, 
and night after night, after a day half-crazed 
by the cares of a nation, he spent watching by 
their beds. When Willie died, it was a blow 

140 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

that overwhelmed him, and for a month he 
seemed hkely to sink under the grief of this 
afflietion. It proved to be one of the great 
inner crises of his life. Always religious in 
the highest sense, he seems at this time to have 
gained deeper insight into the mysteries of the 
spiritual life. "Why is it? Why is it?" he 
would cry out in despair, as he sat watching 
at the child's bedside; and, if the pious nurse 
who shared those weary vigils with him trans- 
lated his experience into the terms of her own 
understanding, it is probable that her sympa- 
thy, if not her theology, comforted him. 

From that hour on his tender heart was 
tenderer, and yearned in growing love over the 
nation. South as w^ell as North, and in a thou- 
sand beautiful and pathetic individual in- 
stances softened the severities of that war 
which, by some strange and inscrutable fate, 
this most peaceful of men was called upon to 
wage. He himself expressed a sense of this 
incongruity in a letter to a Quaker, when he 
said, ''Engaged as I am, in a great war, I 

141 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

fear it will be difficult for the world to under- 
stand how fully I appreciate the principles of 
peace inculcated in this letter and everywhere 
by the Society of Friends." 

While this war was being fought for the 
Union, the question of slavery was, neverthe- 
less, as every one knew, at the bottom of it; 
and Lincoln had early seen that the two issues 
could not long be separated. As long as could 
be, he refrained from interference with the in- 
stitution, but the question arose in many forms. 
Slaves were constantly seeking refuge in 
Union camps, and what to do with them was a 
problem which military commanders in the 
field dealt with as their principles or their 
prejudices or their politics moved them. Gen- 
eral Ben Butler held them as "contraband of 
war," — a legal trick that delighted the North 
and gave the slaves a new sobriquet; McClel- 
lan threatened to put down any uprising of the 
blacks with an "iron hand" he seemed to reserve 
for that exclusive purpose; Halleck sent the 

142 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

fugitives out of camp; Buell and Hooker al- 
lowed their owners to take them. 

But abolition sentiment was growing, and 
from press and pulpit there were adjurations 
to "set the slaves free." The torrent of ad- 
vice, muddied by abuse, poured on him. With 
the ease with which those to whom the people 
have neglected to delegate the authority know 
how to exercise it, his advisers informed him of 
the people's will; and to this the preachers, in 
their delegations, added that it was the will of 
God. But he held his own counsel, thinking 
out a way. It was the essence of his Border 
State policy to avoid offence to the people 
there, where slavery made a problem of ex- 
quisite delicacy. 

On March 6, 1862, he sent a special message 
to Congress, recommending the adoption of a 
joint resolution that "the United States ought 
to co-operate with any state which may adopt 
gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such 
state pecuniary aid ... to compensate for the 

143 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

inconvenience, both public and private, pro- 
duced by such change of system." The resolu- 
tion was finally adopted, but the Border States 
would have none of it. On JMarch 10 he in- 
vited to the White House the Congressmen 
from those States, hoping to win them to his 
view, which had as its object the disposition he 
had held to since boyhood; namely, gradual 
compensated emancipation. But the border 
members were deaf to his pleadings. Again, 
on July 12, he besought them, but two-thirds 
of them were opposed to the plan. 

In the midst of this difficulty. May 9, 1862, 
General Hunter proclaimed martial law in 
Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, and 
"the persons in these states, heretofore held as 
slaves, . . . forever free." Lincoln revoked 
this order, as he had Fremont's, adding firmly, 
"I further make known that, whether it be 
competent for me as Commander-in-Chief of 
the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of 
any state or states free, and whether at any 
time, in any case, it shall have become a neces- 

144 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

sity indispensable to the maintenance of gov- 
ernment to exercise such supposed power, are 
questions which, under my responsibihty, I 
reserve to myself." 

In his proclamation cancelling Hunter's or- 
der, he referred again to the "solemn proposal 
of the nation" of gradual emancipation to the 
Border States, and added: "To the people of 
these states I now earnestly appeal. I do not 
argue; I beseech you to make the arguments 
for yourselves. You cannot, if you would, be 
blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you 
a calm and enlarged consideration of them, 
ranging, if it may be, far above personal and 
partisan politics. This proposal makes com- 
mon cause for a common object, casting no re- 
proaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. 
The change it contemplates would come as 
gently as the dews from Heaven, not rending or 
wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it ? 
So much good has not been done by one effort 
in all past time, as in the providence of God 
it is now your high privilege to do. May the 

145 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

vast future not have to lament that you have 
neglected it!" 

The scheme, of course, was impractical. 
Union slaveholders were not ready to give up 
their property, and even the most radical of 
abolitionists were not ready to buy them in 
order to set them free. But even then, as back 
in New Salem, Lincoln was not a business 
man: he was a dreamer, a humanitarian, with 
a vision of free men that subordinated consid- 
erations of property. 

Then, rehnquishing his old dream, he began 
to think of emancipation. Constantly he was 
urged to it. Constantly he argued with his 
callers, his volunteer advisers, in his clever way 
weighing the reasons and the chances. While 
he travailed in the agony of this problem, in 
the midst of all his woes there was, of course, 
always Greeley, — "Brother Greeley," as he 
called him. 

On August 19, 1862, Greeley published in 
his newspaper an address to the President, 
under the imposing title of "The Prayer of 

146 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

20,000,000 of People," demanding immediate 
emancipation. It was an unfair and foolish 
paper, but if the editor did not, as he imagined, 
represent twenty millions of people, he did rep- 
resent the extreme group of radicals in the 
Republican party, and they could make as 
great an outcry as twenty millions. To this 
paper Lincoln thought fit to reply, in order to 
explain, not to Greeley, — for that would have 
been impossible, — but to the people. The let- 
ter is really one of his great state papers, and 
it has been said that ''it did more to steady 
the loyal sentiment of the country in a very 
grave emergency than anything that ever came 
from Lincoln's pen." Its essence is found in 
these words : "My paramount object is to save 
the Union, and not either to save or destroy 
slavery. If I could save the Union without 
freeing any slave, I would do it. And if I 
could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would 
do it. And if I could save it by freeing some, 
and leaving others alone, I would also do that. 
... I have here stated my purpose, according 

147 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

to my view of official duty, and I intend no 
modification of my oft-expressed personal 
wish, that all men everywhere shall be free." 

The spirit and the sense were all lost on the 
oblivious Greeley, who retorted with abuse. 
But the abolitionists did not cease their agita- 
tion, and to a committee of Chicago preachers 
that waited on him in September, to reveal to 
him the will of God, Lincoln said: — 

"If it is probable that God would reveal His 
will to others on a point so connected with my 
duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it 
directly to me. . . . These are not, however, 
the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be 
granted that I am not to expect a direct revela- 
tion. I must study the plain physical facts 
of the case, ascertain what is possible, and 
learn what appears to be wise and right." 

And he continued: — 

"What good would a proclamation of eman- 
cipation from me do, especially as we are now 
situated? I do not want to issue a document 
that the whole world will see must necessarily 

148 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the 
comet." 

Meanwhile, at JNIajor Eckert's desk in the 
cipher-room of the War Department telegraph 
office, this silent, self-reliant man, without in- 
timates, w^ithout friends, who bore almost alone 
on his mighty shoulders the burden of the na- 
tion's w^ar, had been writing the Emancipa- 
tion Proclamation. It was thus that he was 
accustomed to spend such moments of respite 
as he could snatch from the never-ending 
stream of tormentors in the White House, — 
the office-seekers, politicians, and volunteers of 
sage advice. Ever since June, shortly after 
McClellan's terrible "Seven Days' Fight," he 
had been sitting at that desk, deep in thought, 
now gazing out th.e w^indow at a colony of 
spiders, now writing a few sentences. All 
these months he had been at work, with his 
slow but accurate thought and slow and clear 
writing, preparing the most momentous docu- 
ment in American history since Thomas Jef- 
ferson had wTitten the Declaration. No one 

149 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

knew what he was writing: his cabinet had no 
notion. He was waiting for the right time, 
waiting for a victory. 

He waited long, in his great patience and his 
great anguish. Far back in April he had writ- 
ten McClellan: "Your dispatches complain- 
ing that you are not properly sustained, while 
they do not offend me, do pain me very much. 
. . . The country will not fail to note, is now 
noting, that the present hesitation to move 
upon an intrenched enemy is but the story of 
Manassas repeated. I beg to assure you that 
I have never written you or spoken to you in 
greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with 
a fuller purpose to sustain you so far as, in 
my more anxious judgment, I consistently can. 
But you must act." In May, sick of waiting, 
he had wired, "Is anything to be done?" 
Then, when the cautious "Little Mac" was 
ready, at last, the enemy had abandoned the 
intrenchments. He advanced, fighting, all the 
while demanding reinforcements, which caused 
Lincoln to remark that "sending troops to Mc- 

150 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Clellan is like shovelling fleas across a barn- 
yard." He had waited, the only friend Mc- 
Clellan had left in Washington, and the one 
ISIcClellan most flouted and contemned, un- 
til August, when McClellan's campaign ended 
in fiasco, and the movement on Richmond was 
abandoned. It was a disaster which deepened 
the careworn aspect of that sad countenance, 
but still alone in his mighty trial he struggled 
on. Halleck and Pope were tried; and the 
defeats at Cedar Mountain and the second 
battle of Bull Run were the result. Then, at 
last, on September 17 McClellan fought and 
won the battle of Antietam. It was not so 
great a victory, nor did McClellan press Lee 
after it had been won, but it could be called a 
victory; and Lincoln felt it might serve to in- 
dicate the moment for which, almost supersti- 
tiously, he had been waiting. 

About the end of July he had told his cabinet 
of his determination to issue the proclamation. 
He had told them that he did not desire them 
to offer any advice, — he had so much advice! 

151 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

— but that they might make suggestions as to 
details. They had been naturally silent. He 
had the news from Antietam at the Soldiers' 
Home, where he lived in the summer, and driv- 
ing into Washington on Saturday, September 
20, he called his cabinet together. To Stan- 
ton's undisguised disgust, he fii'st read to them 
from Artemus Ward, on the "Highhanded 
Outrage at Utica," had his laugh, as did the 
cabinet, "except Stanton, of course," and then, 
growing solemn, he read the Proclamation. 
It was preliminary onl}^ and did not promise 
universal emancipation; he still must save the 
Border States. It proclaimed that on Jan- 
uary 1, 1863, "all persons held as slaves within 
any state or designated part of a state, the 
people whereof shall then be in rebellion 
against the United States, shall be then, 
thenceforward, and forever, free"; and that 
"the Executive will, on the first day of Jan- 
uary aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the 
states and part of states, if any, in which the 

152 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

people thereof respectively shall then be in 
rebellion against the United States." 

It was all his own. "I must do the best 
I can," he said, "and bear the responsibility of 
taking the course which I feel I ought to take." 
The proclamation was published on September 
22. 

He had kept his secret well, and the country 
was taken by surprise. The act was, though 
not wholly or heartily, sustained by the people 
and by Congress, though the radical abolition- 
ists even then were not satisfied; they com- 
plained that he had been "forced" to do it, or 
had "drifted with events," or some such thing. 

Then came the fall elections, with such Re- 
publican losses in the Northern States that 
Congress would have been lost to the adminis- 
tration, had it not been for gains in the West 
and in the Border States, and the prospect 
deepened in gloom with the approach of win- 
ter. As a result of these reverses at the polls 
— so discouraging that Greeley, with his un- 

153 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

erring instinct for the wrong thing, was favour- 
ing foreign intervention — there were dissen- 
sions in the cabinet and the party, and these led 
Seward to tender his resignation. Lincohi 
held it until he could secure also the resignation 
of Chase, and then remarking, "Now I can ride; 
I have a pumpkin in each end of my bag," he 
got both secretaries to reconsider and with- 
draw their resignations, and avoided a cabinet 
crisis. 

On Congress he once more urged his old 
policy of gradual compensated emancipation. 
'Tellow citizens," he wrote, "we cannot escape 
history. We of this Congress and this admin- 
istration shall be remembered in spite of our- 
selves. No personal significance or insignifi- 
cance can spare one or another of us. The 
fiery trial through which we pass will light 
us down, in honour or dishonour, to the latest 
generation. We say we are for the Union. 
The world will not forget that we say this. 
We know how to save the Union. The world 
knows we know how to save it. We — even 

154 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

we here — hold the power and bear the responsi- 
bihty. In giving freedom to the slave, we as- 
sure freedom to the free — honourable alike in 
what we give and what we preserve. We shall 
nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope 
of earth. Other means may succeed; this 
could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, 
generous, just — a way which, if followed, the 
world will forever applaud, and God must for- 
ever bless." 

But they were not to be persuaded. And the 
lonely man in the White House, with eyes more 
deeply sunken, bronzed face ashen and deeply 
furrowed, tall form bent, went about his duty, 
asking help nor counsel of any one. "I need 
successes more than I need sympathy," he said. 

On New Year's Day, 1863, after the great 
public reception was over, Lincoln, in the mid- 
dle of the afternoon, signed the final Proclama- 
tion of Emancipation. His hand was swollen 
from shaking the hands of the long line that 
had passed through the East Room, and he 
remarked to Seward, when he had dipped his 

155 



ABRAHAJM LINCOLN 

pen and was holding it over the broad sheet 
spread out before him on the cabinet table; 
"If they find my hand trembled, they will say, 
*he had some compunction.' But, anyway, it 
is going to be done!" Then slowly and care- 
fully he wrote his name. "If my name is ever 
remembered," he said, "it will be for this act, 
and my whole soul is in it." 

If the radical abolitionists could still find 
cause for complaint in the fact that he had 
signed it in the afternoon instead of the morn- 
ing, and if the country could divide over the 
constitutionality of the measure and resume the 
ridicule and abuse which are the right of the 
Republic, — for many dreary, anxious months 
were to elapse before events justified the act, 
— it was well received by the people, if not by 
the government, of England. The sailing of 
the privateer Alabama^ which the British gov- 
ernment permitted or did not prevent, not- 
withstanding American protests, proved al- 
most, if not quite, as serious as the earlier in- 
cident of the Trent, and strained the feeling 

156 



ABRAHAIM LINCOLN 

between the two countries ; and the embarrass- 
ment at their own failure did not improve the 
temper of the British ministers. The govern- 
ment might perhaps have recognised the Con- 
federacy if it could have found excuse, and the 
starving cotton-mill workers in Lancashire, 
idle because of the Northern blockade of 
Southern ports, could have furnished the ex- 
cuse. But English Radicalism, led by Cob- 
den and Bright, Imew that the cause which 
Lincoln was representing was their cause, — 
the cause of the people, and of labour through- 
out the world; and it was a splendid and in- 
spiring proof of the solidarity of labour that 
six thousand men at JManchester sent the Presi- 
dent an address congratulating and encourag- 
ing him. In his grateful acknowledgment, 
Lincoln referred to the act of the men of Lan- 
cashire as, under the circumstances of their 
suffering, "an instance of Christian heroism 
which had not been surpassed in any age or in 
any country." Similar meetings were held in 
London and Sheffield, and a notable one by 

157 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the Trades Unions at St. James's Hall in 
March 

Thus, if governments and principalities and 
powers and the great and strong and power- 
ful of the earth were sneering in opposition, the 
great heart of the people everywhere was with 
him who bore their cause so bravely ; and when, 
a few years later, those British mechanics gave 
their pennies to erect a modest monument to 
his memory, they erected, perhaps, the most 
beautiful and significant memorial ever given 
him, when they inscribed on it his name as a 
"Lover of Humanity." 



158 



After Antietam, Lincoln came as near to 
losing patience with McClellan as he ever came 
with any one; but he wrote him another kind 
letter about what he considerately called "over- 
cautiousness," and finally, long after every one 
had lost faith, relieved him of his command and 
devolved it on Burnside. The result was an- 
other failure. On December 13, 1862, Lee 
defeated Burnside at Fredericksburg. All 
day Lincoln had been in the telegraph office, in 
dressing-gown and slippers, forgetting even to 
eat, and, when at night the dreadful news came, 
—more than ten thousand dead and wounded, 
—he was close on despair: "If there is any 
man out of perdition who suffers more than I 
do," he said, "I pity him." 

Then on January 26, 1863, he put "Fight- 
ing Joe" Hooker in Burnside's place, writing 
him: "I have heard, in such way as to believe 

159 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

it, of your recently saying that both the army 
and the government need a dictator. Of 
course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, 
that I have given you the command. Only 
those generals who gain successes can set up as 
dictators. What I now ask of you is military 
success, and I will risk the dictatorship." 
Hooker read the letter with tears in his eyes. 
But that splendid army, too, was to meet de- 
feat. Hooker, though a good lieutenant, was 
a poor chief, and when. May 2, he met Lee at 
Chancellors ville, "though the Federals fought 
like devils," he was beaten in a bloody battle. 
When the wires bore the news to Lincoln, his 
face went ghastly grey, and, with hands clasped 
behind his back, he paced the floor, saying pite- 
ously: "My God! My God! What will the 
country say! What will the country say!" 

But he put all this behind him, and fixed his 
sad eyes, sinking deeper and deeper into their 
caverns, on the future. In the telegraph office 
he began to ask: "Where's Meade? What's 
the Fifth Corps doing?" And when Hooker, 

160 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

angry with Halleck, resigned, he appointed 
Meade in his place. On July 1 the armies of 
Meade and Lee grappled in a death struggle 
at Gettysburg. Those three terrible days Lin- 
coln was in the telegraph office, anxiously lean- 
ing over the shoulder of the operator who re- 
ceived the story, — Cemetery Ridge, Little 
Round Top, Culp's Hill, and, at last, the mag- 
nificent, forlorn charge of Pickett. Then his 
hopes rose. He knew that Meade had won a 
notable victory. And yet JMeade, too, like 
INIcClellan after Antietam, failed to pursue, 
and Lee got away across the Potomac. Lin- 
coln felt this failure deeply. He had always 
believed that, if Lee crossed the Potomac, his 
army could be destroyed and the war ended. 
Now the failure to reap all the fruits of the 
noble victory, bought at such an awful price 
of human life, would indefinitely prolong the 
war. 

But, when he received Grant's despatch an- 
nouncing the fall of Vicksburg, his spirits rose 
with the nation's spirits, and he issued a 

161 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

proclamation, one of that series he wrote, in 
the solemn style of the old prophets, often in 
sorrow appointing days of "fasting and 
prayer," now for the second time, in gladness, 
naming August 6 as "a day for National 
Thanksgiving, praise and prayer." 

These victories, in the East and in the West, 
falling by a striking coincidence on the day 
in the spirit of which the war was being car- 
ried on, brought him encouragement when he 
was in need of encouragement. The times had 
been full of embarrassment; volunteer enlist- 
ments had ceased, he had been obliged to re- 
sort to the hateful draft, and this, in July, had 
brought on riots in New York. Then there 
were the "Copperheads," and the "Knights of 
the Golden Circle," with their secret oaths, and 
Vallandigham, court-martialed for treason and 
sentenced to imprisonment. Lincoln, 

"slow to smite and swift to spare," 

was not much concerned over the Copperheads, 
and he disposed of all the arguments about 

162 






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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Vallandigham by saying, "Must I shoot a 
simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while 
I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who 
induces him to desert?" And then (with a 
humorous chuckle, no doubt) he modified the 
sentence, and ordered Vallandigham to be con- 
ducted within the Confederate lines. 

But Gettysburg and Vicksburg turned the 
tide; and in good spirits he summed up the 
situation in a letter to friends in Springfield, 
which must have sounded pleasantly famihar 
to the old neighbours he would have liked so 
much to visit once more: "The signs look bet- 
ter. The Father of Waters rolls unvexed to 
the sea. ... It is hard to say that anything 
has been more bravely and well done than at 
Antietam, Murfreesboro', Gettysburg, and on 
many fields of lesser note. . . . Peace does not 
appear so distant as it did. I hope it will 
come soon, and come to stay; and so come as 
to be worth the keeping in all future time. 
• . . Still, let us not be oversanguine of a 
speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober, 

163 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

let us diligently apply the means, never doubt- 
ing that a just God, in his own good time, will 
give us the rightful result." 

The letter, passing suddenly from gay to 
grave, was characteristic. He was not always 
sad. Not a day passed, not the darkest hour, 
that he did not have his joke or tell his story. 
This habit distressed the literal Seward, the 
irascible Stanton, and others; and yet when 
Congressman Ashley said severely, "Mr. Presi- 
dent, I didn't come in here this morning to 
hear stories : it is too serious," the light died out 
of the sensitive face as he said, *'If it were not 
for this occasional vent, I should die." He 
liked, as we have seen, the humour of Artemus 
Ward, of Orpheus C. Kerr, and of "Petroleum 
V. Nasby," though he was not a great reader. 
Herndon says he "read less and thought more 
than any man who ever lived." But he had 
favourites, — Burns, whose point of view was 
like his own, and Byron atid Bacon. The 
lines, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal 
be proud?" he had loved ever since they had 

164 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

been associated in his mind with Anne Rut- 
ledge, and he hked to recite Shakespeare, 
though in his writings he quoted httle. He 
was fond of the theatre, and sometimes went 
to the play, sometimes to concerts. He was 
delighted with the acting of James H. 
Hackett, and wrote him, after a friendliness 
had sprung up between them: "For one of 
my age I have seen very little of the drama. 
I think nothing equals INIacbeth ; it is wonder- 
ful." When the letter got into print, and cer- 
tain of the elect sneered at him, he wrote: 
"Those comments constitute a fair specimen 
of what has occurred to me through life. I 
have endured a great deal of ridicule without 
much malice; and have received a great deal 
of kindness not quite free from ridicule. I am 
used to it." 

As he went about the Wliite House, in the 
telegraph office, out at the Soldiers' Home, 
even on trips to headquarters at the front. Tad 
was usually with him. He would sit in his lap 
or hang on his chair even while the President re- 

165 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ceived important callers, and we have intimate 
pictures of him, late in the evening, when, worn 
by the trials each day brought in abundance, 
he would lift the sleepy boy in his great arms 
and bear him off to bed. "All well, including 
Tad's pony and the goats," he wired Mrs. Lin- 
coln at Manchester, Vermont, and lat^r he 
found time to send this intelhgence: "Tell 
dear Tad poor Nanny goat is lost. . . . The 
day you left Nanny was found resting herself 
and chewing her little cud on the middle of 
Tad's bed, but now she's gone." With this 
parental love there was the parental concern, 
and in him there was an occult strain that ex- 
pressed itself in little superstitions. He was, 
for instance, curiously affected by dreams, 
which at times became portents and omens to 
him. Thus in June, 1863, he wired to Mrs. 
Lincoln at Philadelphia: "Think you had 
better put Tad's pistol away. I had an ugly 
dream about him." The tremendous strain 
was wearing on his nerves. His health had 
suffered ; under his mighty burden he was tired, 

166 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and he slept badly, especially at the White 
House. Because of the callers — who of course 
asked "only a minute" of his time, which meant, 
as he explained, that, if he could hear and 
grant the request in that time, a minute would 
suffice — and because of the long weary nights 
in the War Office, hanging intently on the 
next click of the telegraph, regular hours were 
impossible. He ate little, — a glass of milk and 
biscuit or some fruit at luncheon; and though 
he dined at six, as he told Mrs. Stowe, he "just 
browsed round a little now and then." 

Much of his time was spent in the telegraph 
office. There, when he was not looking over 
despatches or writing them, or studying war 
maps, he would chat with the operators, or 
perhaps only lean back in his chair, with his 
long legs stretched to a table, and gaze moodily 
out into Pennsylvania Avenue. The soldiers 
almost individually he had on his heart with a 
love that was personal. The long list of the 
telegrams he sent from that office are but a 
beautiful repetition of pardon and forgive- 

167 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ness. One finds orders to commanders in the 
field to postpone the executions of death sen- 
tences pronounced on deserters, — precious 
fruits of that day's audience at the White 
House. He knew how those boys at the front 
suffered from homesickness. He had, indeed, 
at his own heart, all his life, a pain not unlike 
nostalgia, — the pain that comes of the knowl- 
edge of life and of the suffering men make for 
their brothers in the world, a pain that filled 
him with a vast and tender pity. "Will you 
please hurry off the above ? To-morrow is the 
day of execution," he frequently wrote to 
Major Eckert in transmitting such despatches. 
And he took infinite pains to seek out, in all 
those vast armies, some hapless individual of 
whom he had imperfectly heard. *'If there is 

a man by the name of K under sentence to 

be shot, please suspend execution until further 
orders, and send record," he wired to Meade, 
and similarly to other generals. 

"But that does not pardon my boy," a father 
168 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

said to him one day, in disajDpointment at what 
seemed to him a mere postponement. 

"My dear man," Lincoln replied, "do you 
suppose I will ever give orders for your boy's 
execution?" 

He was constantly visiting the hospitals, and 
just a week before his assassination, as he was 
about to enter a ward occupied by sick and 
wounded prisoners, the attendant said, "Mr. 
President, you won't want to go in there : they 
are only rebels." He laid his hand on the at- 
tendant's shoulder, and said, "You mean Con- 
federates'' and went on in. Such was the more 
than paternal love and tenderness that brooded 
in his great heart. No wonder the soldiers 
called him "Father Abraham," and the South, 
in after years, learned that it had lost its best 
friend. 

Thus, through trial and sorrow and disap- 
pointment, under the most tremendous respon- 
sibility that ever weighted a leader, he came 
to that great character which made him wholly 

169 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and completely a Man. They sneered at him 
for his lack of education, and yet he might 
have been said to be almost perfectly educated. 
Certainly he was cultured ; for had he not wis- 
dom, pity, love, humour, shrewdness, and a 
rarely sympathetic imagination, that enabled 
him to put himself in every other man's place ? 
These qualities, with what is denoted by the 
phrase "common sense," though in him, surely, 
it was rather an uncommon sense, combined in 
perfect equilibrium to make him the ideal 
American. He came to fullest expression, 
perhaps, in the beautiful address at the dedica- 
tion of the National Cemetery on the battle- 
field of Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. Ed- 
ward Everett delivered the formal oration, and 
then Lincoln, having been asked to make a 
''few appropriate remarks," arose, and "in an 
unconscious and absorbed manner" slowly put 
on his spectacles and read the immortal words. 
Those who heard were disappointed. Seward 
and others thought he had not proved equal to 
the occasion, and were glad that Everett had 

ITO 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

been there to save the day. Everett's ora- 
tion is neglected, if not forgotten, but hterature 
will imj)erishably preserve these noble lines : — 
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers 
brought forth on this continent a new nation, 
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the prop- 
osition that all men are created equal. Now 
we are engaged in a great civil war, testing 
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived 
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are 
met upon a great battlefield of that war. We 
have come to dedicate a portion of that field as 
a final resting place for those who here gave 
their lives that that nation might live. It is 
altogether fitting and proper that we should do 
this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedi- 
cate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow 
this ground. The brave men, living and dead, 
who struggled here, have consecrated it far 
above our poor power to add or detract. The 
world will little note, nor long remember, what 
we say here ; but it can never forget what they 
did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be 

171 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

dedicated here to the unfinished work which 
they who fought here have thus far so nobly 
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedi- 
cated to the great task remaining before us; 
— that from these honoured dead, we take in- 
creased devotion to that cause for which they 
gave the last full measure of devotion; — ^that 
we here highly resolve that these dead shall 
not have died in vain, that this nation, under 
God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and 
that government of the people, by the people, 
for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 
The tide had turned, but more than eighteen 
weary months were to pass before it would be 
at the flood of victory. Lincoln was spending 
anxious hours in the War Office, his attention 
just then focussed on the maps of south-east- 
ern Tennessee. He was trying to force Burn- 
side to unite with Bosecrans, and move on 
Bragg. Burnside got to Knoxville and 
halted. On September 19, without waiting 
longer, Bosecrans had to give battle, and the 
armies clashed stubbornly on the field of Chick- 

172 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

amauga. After two days of fiercest fighting, 
Rosecrans withdrew, and the battle would have 
been a Confederate victory but for Thomas, 
who held the Federal left and earned his name 
of "The Rock of Chickamauga." Thomas 
covered Rosecrans's withdrawal to Chatta- 
nooga, where, though demoralised, he found he 
had not been so badly worsted as he had 
thought. Lincoln telegraphed to him: **Be 
of good cheer, we have unstinted confidence in 
you. . . . We shall do our utmost to assist 
you." And he did his utmost. He pricked 
Burnside forv/ard, ordered Sherman up, and, 
when Rosecrans's alarms came to him at the 
wSoldiers' Home, he rode to Washington by 
moonlight, and there in the War Office was 
devised the remarkable plan of transporting 
by rail the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps under 
Hooker. In twelve days these veterans from 
the Army of the Potomac were at Chattanooga. 
Wisest act of all, he put Thomas in Rose- 
crans's place, and Grant in command of the 
military division of the Mississippi. Grant 

173 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

came, and, with Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, 
and Hooker under him, on November 24 and 
25 fought and won the battles of Lookout 
JMountain and Missionary Ridge. Thus East 
Tennessee was cleared of Confederate occu- 
pation, and its loyal inhabitants freed from 
their long thraldom. The President had good 
reason now to issue his third proclamation of 
National Thanksgiving. The document, in its 
high and solemn style, breathes his own spirit : 
"No human counsel hath devised, nor halii any 
mortal hand worked out these great things. 
They are the gracious gifts of the most high 
God, who, while dealing with us in anger for 
our sins, hath, nevertheless, remembered 
mercy." Nor could his pity forget "all those 
who have become widows, orphans, mourners 
or sufferers in this lamentable civil strife." 

Meade, no nearer Richmond than ever, had 
gone into winter quarters, and now for a while 
Lincoln was to be burdened more with politics 
than with war. On December 8, 1863, he sent 
to Congress his third annual message, which 

174 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

surprised every one by its "Proclamation of 
iimnesty." The proposed amnesty, offered 
in his own concihatory spirit, was to be em- 
braced on taking an oath to "support, protect 
and defend" the Constitution and the Union. 
At first the proclamation was received in good 
temper, but soon this changed. The politi- 
cians v/ere jealous of the legislative -prerogsi- 
tive, and were incapable of the forgiving spirit 
of Lincoln. They still hated the "rebels," as 
they called the Southerners who were trying 
so hard to secede, though Lincohi seldom called 
them that. And even those who could put 
away revenge felt that it was unsafe to restore 
to the Southerners all rights of citizensliip 
upon mere protestation of loyalty. The ques- 
tion, too, was involved in many difficulties, 
among them the granting of suffrage to the 
negroes, in which, by the way, if at ail, Lin- 
coln believed only to a hmited extent. Con- 
gress took up the subject in fiery spirit, and 
eventually passed a bill which was much more 
exacting than the President's, and beyond that 

175 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

retained in the power of Congress the whole 
execution of the pohcy of reconstruction. Of | 
this bill Lincoln could not approve, and it thus 
may be said to have inaugurated that unfor- 
tunate policy which inflamed the wounds al- 
ready made, and which, conceived in hatred, 
under the great law of moral equivalents pro- 
duced its ugly results of hatred long after he 
was gone, — a policy that would have been so 
wisely otherwise, had he lived to imbue it with 
his great spirit! But in these troubles he had 
consolation. At last, in Grant, whom he had 
been watching ever since Donelson, he had 
found a general. Congress created the grade 
of lieutenant-general, — a rank not held by any 
one since Washington, save Scott, and then 
only by brevet, — and on March 3, 1864, Lin- 
coln gave Grant his commission and placed 
him in command of all the armies. A few days 
later Grant arrived in Washington, and these 
two Westerners met for the first time. The 
President looked at the square jaw, the de- 
termined face, and knew that he had found his 

176 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

man. Grant, his headquarters with the Army 
of the Potomac, started on that long and ter- 
rible campaign which was to end only with 
the fall of Richmond. "The particulars of 
your plan I neither know nor seek to know," 
Lincoln wrote him; and Grant replied, ''Should 
my success be less than I desire and expect, the 
least I can say is, the fault is not with you." 
Strange, comforting words from a general, 
especially a general in Virginia ! He gave Lee 
battle immediately, and for two days the dread- 
ful swamps in the Wilderness were the scene 
of such carnage that Grant could say, "More 
desperate fighting has not been seen on this 
continent." From Spottsylvania he wired, "I 
propose to fight it out on this line if it takes 
all summer." But his despatches were few 
and laconic. To Lincoln the waiting in the 
War Office for news was sometimes a strain. 
"This man doesn't telegraph much," he re- 
marked. The terrible sacrifice of life sad- 
dened him, and, after bloody Cold Harbour, a 
groan went up from the North ; and yet he sent 

177 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Grant word, "Hold on with a bull-dog grip, 
and chew and choke as much as possible." 
And Grant held on, and, if the country could 
not realise it, Lincoln, with Grant before Rich- 
mond, felt that the end was sure. 

For one day, early in July, the President 
himself was under fire. Grant had left the 
capital uncovered, and Lee detached Early's 
cavalry to dash into Maryland and, if possible, 
capture Washington. Lew Wallace held him 
back, however, at the Monocacy, and saved the 
capital and the cause. There were skirmishes 
as desperately close as Fort Stevens, four miles 
from Lincoln's summer cottage at the Soldiers' 
Home, and twice he visited the fortifications 
and witnessed the fighting through glasses, his 
tall form a conspicuous target for sharp- 
shooters. An officer was killed within a few 
feet of where he stood, and Stanton ordered the 
President — rather sharply, it may be suspected 
— to remain in Washington. When Early got 
closer, his men recognised the tattered flag of 
the Sixth Corps, and the veterans Grant had 

178 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

sent were there to save Washington. The 
crisis was short, but it had been big with dan- 
ger. On September 3, 1864, came word from 
Sherman that ^'Atlanta is ours, and fairly 
won." A month later Sheridan made his ride 
to Winchester. Then came Farragut's dar- 
ing victory in Mobile Bay. 

These successes were sorely needed, for with 
the approach of the presidential campaign of 
1864 the administration seemed to totter. The 
news of the fall of Atlanta and of Farragut's 
victory came just as the Democrats in conven- 
tion were declaring the war to be a failure. 
Early in the year there had been serious op- 
position to Lincoln's renomination. Chase 
was graceless enough to be an avowed candi- 
date for the Presidency against the man in 
whose cabinet he sat, but Lincoln was indif- 
ferent. He had a keen insight into the moods 
of the public mind, and an almost unerring 
instinct as to public opinion, and took little ac- 
count of the politicians, for he sustained in- 
timate relations with the people. The differ- 

179 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ence with Chase finally sent the Secretary of 
the Treasury out of the cabmet, and the Presi- 
dent appointed William Pitt Fessenden of 
Maine to the vacancy. But the President 
never cherished ill feeling. When the aged 
Chief Justice Taney died, not long after, he 
appointed Chase to his place on the Supreme 
Court. Many of the radicals in his party were 
against him, — Fremont, and Wendell Phillips, 
and, of course, Greeley. But William Lloyd 
Garrison, Owen Love joy, and Oliver Johnson, 
wiser, more practical than the rest, supported 
him warmly, though the radicals and some of 
the Missouri malcontents held a factional con- 
vention at Cleveland, May 31, and nominated 
Fremont for President. 

Lincoln did nothing to bring about his own 
renomination, and by the time the Republican 
Convention met at Baltimore, June 7, opposi- 
tion had ceased, and he was renominated, with 
Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, for Vice- 
President. Lincoln was pleased, of course, 
and said to a delegation, come with congratu- 

180 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

lations, that he supposed that it had been "con- 
cluded that it is not best to swap horses while 
crossing the river." 

But he was to meet heavy opposition. Val- 
landigham, from his asylum in Canada, was 
running for Governor of Ohio on the Demo- 
cratic ticket, the cry for peace was going up, 
Greeley was writing in his Tribune about "our 
bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country," 
and the "prospect of new rivers of human 
blood." Lincoln's friends were losing hope, 
and Leonard Swett expressed their feeling 
when he wrote, "Unless material changes can 
be wrought, Lincoln's election is beyond any 
possible hope." But, while Lincoln humanly 
desired re-election, he would not hsten to his 
friends when they proposed politicians' 
methods of bringing it about. He would not 
allow office-holders to influence their em- 
ployees, he would not use patronage to buy 
votes, nor would he stop the draft, but in the 
very midst of the campaign approved an order 
calhng for 500,000 men. "I cannot run the 

181 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

political machine," he said. "I have enough 
on my hands without that. It is the people's 
business — the election is in their hands. If 
they turn their backs to the fire and get 
scorched in the rear, they'll find they have to 
sit on the blister." 

The old melancholy settled black upon him. 
He felt certain of defeat. On August 23, 
1864^, he wrote this memorandum: "This 
morning, as for some days past, it seems ex- 
ceedingly probable.that this administration will 
not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty 
to so co-operate with the President-elect as to 
save the Union between the election and the in- 
auguration, as he will have secured his elec- 
tion on such ground that he cannot possibly 
save it afterward. A. Lincoln." He showed 
it to no one, but sealed it and had the cabinet 
members sign their names on the envelope. 
Then he put it away, — curious evidence of his 
utter devotion to duty, on the one hand, and of 
the strain of superstition that was in him; for 

182 



I 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

in the act there must have been some half -un- 
conscious effort to propitiate the fates. 

And yet, despite abuse and viHfication such 
as few men have endured in silence, despite 
the foohsh advice of panic-stricken friends, he 
kept his head, and went on, alone, in his own 
way. He was accused of prolonging the war 
for inscrutable purposes of his own, and, when 
a man Imown as "Colorado Jewett" wrote 
Greeley that two ambassadors, representing 
Jefferson Davis, were on the Canadian side at 
Niagara Falls, ready and willing to negotiate 
a peace, Greeley wrote the President an hys- 
terical letter, urging that representatives be 
sent to meet them. Lincoln "just thought" he 
would let Greeley "go up and crack that nut 
for himself," and promptly appointed him to 
negotiate this peace. Greeley for once was 
taken aback and demurred, but Lincoln with 
keen satisfaction insisted, and Greeley had to 
go, — for Lincoln was adamant when once his 
purpose was fixed,— and, after days of nego- 

183 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

tiations mysterious and secret, the whole thing 
fell through, the "representatives of Davis & 
Co." had no authority whatever, and Greeley 
succeeded, as the wise President had foreseen, 
only in making himself ridiculous. The news- 
papers published the correspondence, though 
not all of it. Greeley would not consent to 
publication unless elisions were made of items 
reflecting on him, and this Lincoln magnan- 
imously waived, even though the publication 
in that form did him an injustice. But the 
incident, ridiculous as it was, convinced the 
people that there was no such chance of peace 
as Greeley and the Democrats contended. 

The Democratic Convention, late in August, 
met at Chicago, and nominated McClellan for 
the Presidency on a peace platform, and his 
chances then seemed excellent ; but Farragut's 
victory in Mobile, the fall of Atlanta, and 
Sheridan's ride disposed of their claim that the 
war was a failure. Though McClellan re- 
pudiated this platform declaration, his chances 
waned as the campaign advanced, and when 

184 



ABRAHAIM LINCOLN 

the October elections were over, with their Re- 
pubhcan gains, Vallandigham defeated in 
Ohio, and all that, it was evident that Lincoln's 
forebodings had no basis. On the night of 
November 8, 1864, he sat in the telegraph 
office with his cabinet officers about him, and, 
v/hile the returns were coming in, he read at 
intervals from Nasby's latest "Letters from 
Confederate X Roads." Stanton was indig- 
nant, and grumbled at the President's trifling. 
But the President was serene, and for the mo- 
ment happy, in the vindication the people had 
given him. His mighty faith was justified, 
the prayer that was his very habit of thought 
had been answered, and his weary eyes at last 
saw, not far off, the end of the war. 

At two o'clock in the morning, to serenaders 
at the White House, he spoke simply: "If I 
know my heart, my gratitude is free from any 
taint of personal triumph. I do not impugn 
the motives of any one opposed to me. It is 
no pleasure to me to triumph over any one, 
but I give thanks to the Almighty for this 

185 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

evidence of the people's resolution to stand by- 
free government and the rights of humanity." 
He had a plurality of 494,567, and received 
212 votes in the electoral college to McClellan's 
21. 



186 



yi 

At last, the end was in sight. Grant 
was beleaguering Petersburg, Sherman had 
marched from Atlanta to the sea, Thomas had 
shattered the Confederate army at Nashville, 
the stars and bars had been swept from the 
ocean. There was in the heart of Lincoln, as 
in the heart of every one, an ineffable longing 
for peace, but he demanded a "peace worth 
winning." "The war," he said in his message 
to Congress, "will cease on the part of the 
Government whenever it shall have ceased on 
the part of those who began it." And he 
would never be a party to the re-enslavement 
of any of those emancipated by his Proclama- 
tion: "If the people should, by whatever 
mode or means, make it an executive duty to 
re-enslave such persons, another and not I 
must be their instrument to perform it." He 

187 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

urged the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing 
slavery, and when, with the assistance of 
Democratic votes, the amendment was 
adopted, there were cheers and a mighty dem- 
onstration which Speaker Colfax's gavel could 
not silence or abate, the House adjourned in 
"honour of this immortal and sublime event," 
and artillery roared its salutes from Capitol 
Hill. Then crowds swarmed into the White 
House, and Lincoln expressed his gratitude 
that "the great job is ended." 

All the while the agitation for peace went 
on, and finally, as the result of Francis P. 
Blair's efforts, early in February the President 
went with Seward to Hampton Roads, and 
there on board the steamer River Queen met 
the Peace Commissioners of the Confederacy, 
Alexander H. Stephens, R. M. T. Hunter, 
and John A. Campbell. For five hours they 
talked, but it came to nothing. Lincoln would 
enter into no agreement with "parties in arms 
against the Government." He would do noth- 
ing, say nothing, that might be construed as a 

188 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

recognition of the Confederacy as a treating 
power. Hunter found a precedent in the case 
of Charles I of England, who had treated 
"with the people in arms against him." Lin- 
coln gazed across the water. "I do not profess 
to be posted in history," he said in his dry, in- 
imitable way; "on all such matters I will turn 
you over to Seward. All I distinctly recol- 
lect about the case of Charles I is that he lost 
his head!" 

It was perhaps only what Lincoln had ex- 
pected. And yet, if he brought back from 
Hampton Roads nothing tangible, he brought 
back the conviction that the Southern cause 
was lost, and that the Southerners knew it; 
for, reader of men that he was, those sad eyes 
had penetrated the masque of pride worn by 
the Confederate Commissioners and read the 
hopelessness in their hearts. His own heart 
was centred on forgiveness, amity, and gener- 
osity. He feared that the vindictive spirit he 
found about him, now when the triumph should 
come, would keep alive the ugly hatred the 

189 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

war had generated in nearly every breast but 
his. This beautiful spirit he breathed into his 
second inaugural address, comparable in dig- 
nity and in literary beauty only to the Gettys- 
burg address. On the 4th day of March, 1865, 
from the east portico of the Capitol, to an audi- 
ence assembled under conditions far different 
from those which had existed four years be- 
fore, he read the enduring words : "Fondly do 
we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty 
scourge of war may speedily pass away. 
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the 
wealth piled by the bondmen's two hundred 
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, 
and until every drop of blood drawn with the 
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the 
sword, as was said three thousand years ago, 
so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the 
Lord are true and righteous altogether.** 
With malice toward none, with charity for all, 
with firmness in the right as God gives us to 
see the right, let us strive on to finish the work 
we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; 

190 



ABRAHAIM LINCOLN 

to care for him who shall have borne the battle, 
and for his widow and his orphan, — to do all 
which may achieve and cherish a just and last- 
ing peace among om-selves and with all na- 
tions." 

About the middle of that month of March, 
Lincoln had word from Grant telling him he 
was about to close in on Lee and end the war. 
Then on the 20th Grant telegraphed: *'Can 
you not visit City Point for a day or two? I 
would like very much to see you, and I think 
the rest would do you good." Rest ! For this 
weary man! Could it be? '*I am afraid," he 
had said to some woman who, taking the hand 
that had signed the pardon of her husband 
and her son, had gone down on her knees and 
spoken of meeting him in heaven, — "I am 
afraid with all my troubles I shall never get 
to the resting place you speak of." He was 
deeply moved. Speed was there, the old 
friend, whom the war had separated from him. 
It was the close of a hard day, and Speed 
remonstrated with him for yielding to such 

191 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

demands upon his sympathies. He had wear- 
ily half agreed, saying that he was ill, that his 
hands and feet were always cold, and that he 
ought to be in bed. And yet such scenes as 
that through which he had just passed con- 
soled him, after all. "It is more than one can 
often say," he told Speed, "that in doing right, 
one has made two people happy in one day." 
And so he accepted Grant's invitation. 
Mrs. Lincoln and his beloved Tad went with 
him; and they all were happy as the River 
Queen dropped down the Potomac, and as- 
cended the James to City Point, where Grant 
had his headquarters. While he was there, 
Sherman came up from North Carolina, and 
with him and Grant the President conferred. 
The generals felt that each must fight another 
battle to end the war, but Lincoln pleaded for 
"no more bloodshed." He was there in touch 
with the final movements of the army on that 
night of awful thunderstorms which Grant 
chose for his last general advance against Lee, 
and the moment the news came that the Con- 

192 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

federate capital had fallen and that Jefferson 
Davis had fled he said, "I want to go to Rich- 
mond." And so, on the morning of April 4, 
with Admiral Porter and little Tad, he went 
aboard the River Queen; but obstructions 
placed in the James by the Confederates dur- 
ing the siege deterred them, and, leaving 
the steamer, the President went on in the ad- 
miral's barge. They stopped long enough to 
let Tad disembark and gather some spring 
flowers from the river-banks, and then went on 
to Richmond. 

Thus, after four years of war, with Tad and 
the admiral and his little escort of sailors, 
simply, on foot, he entered the abandoned 
capital. The city was in utter demoralisation, 
parts of it in flames, fii'cd by the flying Con- 
federates; but he walked in safety, bringing 
with him not the vengeance of a conqueror, 
but the love of a liberator. The negroes 
flocked to see him, greeting him with supersti- 
tious reverence, bursting into tears, shouting 
veritable hosannas. "Mars' Lincoln he walk 

193 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

de yearf lak de Lo'd!" shouted one; and an- 
other, f aUing on his knees to kiss his feet, cried, 
*'Bress de Lo'd, dere is de great Messiah!" 
And there was no more significant moment, 
perhaps, in all history than that which recog- 
nised political liberty in America, when an 
aged negro, baring his white wool, made rever- 
ent obeisance, and Lincoln in acknowledgment 
lifted his high hat. 

The guard rescued him, however, from the 
crowd, and conducted him to the Confederate 
Mansion, the late residence of Jefferson Davis. 
He remained in Richmond two days, discuss- 
ing the details of the restoration of Federal 
authority. His counsel was all for kindness, 
forgiveness. ''Once get them to ploughing," 
he said to Porter, "and gathering in their own 
little crops, eating popcorn at their own fire- 
sides, and you can't get them to shoulder a 
musket again for half a century." To the 
military governor he said, "Let them down 
easy." And when, at Libby Prison, some one 
declared that Jefferson Davis ought to be 

194 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

hanged, he said, "Judge not, that ye be not 
judged." It was in this temper, the expres- 
sion of a spiritual development far beyond 
that of any of his contemporaries, a develop- 
ment that centuries hence will still be in ad- 
vance of the world of men, that he was already 
preparing to "bind up the nation's wounds." 
He went back to City Point, and thence, on 
hearing that Seward had been injured by be- 
ing thrown from his carriage, he hastened on 
to Washington. There he heard of Lee's sur- 
render at Appomattox. Two days later, to a 
large crowd at the White House, he delivered 
a carefully prepared address on the rehabilita- 
tion of the Southern States. In this speech 
he outlined the policy of reconstruction he in- 
tended to pursue, and had already applied in 
the case of Louisiana. He had been bitterly 
criticised, as usual. The address was full of 
his pungent personality, marked by his quaint 
and trenchant style. "Concede," he said, 
"that the new government of Louisiana is only, 
to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl, 

195 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the 
egg than by smashing it." It was the last 
speech he ever made. 

It was little Tad who said that his father had 
never been happy since they came to Washing- 
ton. He had, indeed, under that awful 
burden, grown rapidly old, his laughter had 
failed, he had become more and more detached, 
more abstracted, his grey eyes were veiled, as 
though his physical, like his spiritual, vision 
were turned inward. Dreadful dreams had 
haunted him. On the night of the 13th he had 
one which oppressed him: he "was in a singular 
and indescribable vessel — moving toward a 
dark and indefinite shore." In the morning 
— it was Good Friday, April 14, the fourth 
anniversary of the evacuation of Fort Sumter 
— he told this dream to his cabinet, then turned 
to business. Grant was present, having come 
up from Appomattox. They wished to know 
about Sherman's movements. 

But now, at last, he was happy, sharing with 
the people he loved the gladness that came with 

196 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the end of the war. The sadness in his face 
was giving way to an expression of lofty seren- 
ity, of sweet and quiet joy. That day he was 
especially cheerful. The nation in its noisy 
American way, with bands and bonfires and 
bells, with illuminations and resolutions and 
speeches, was celebrating the victory down in 
Charleston harbour. Henry Ward Beecher 
was delivering the oration at the ceremony of 
raising the Union flag once more over black- 
ened Sumter. All Washington was celebrat- 
ing, the draft had been suspended. Grant was 
in town, the war was over; and in the cabinet 
Lincoln would hear of nothing but amnesty, 
reconciliation, fraternal love. There were no 
more "rebels," he said: they were "our fellow- 
citizens." 

He drove out with Mrs. Lincoln in the soft 
sunshine of the spring day. The trees were 
blossoming; the lilacs, which Walt ^^Tiitman 
has forever associated with the fragrant mem- 
ory of him, were in bloom, and, as they drove 
together, he spoke of the future. He had 

197 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

saved a little money during his Presidency, 
they would save a little more, go back to 
Springfield, and he would practise law again. 
And yet to the wife by his side this joy was 
portentous. He had been like this, she re- 
membered, just before Willie died. 

They drove back to the White House in the 
waning afternoon, and, seeing some old friends 
from Illinois on the lawn, he called to them. 
Richard Oglesby was among them, and they 
went to the President's office, where he read 
to them some book of humour, — John Phoenix, 
perhaps, — and laughed and loitered, and was 
late to dinner. For the evening Mrs. Lincoln 
had arranged a theatre party, with General 
and Mrs. Grant as her guests. They were 
going to Ford's Theatre, to see Laura Keene 
play in Our American Cousin, The manager 
of the theatre, with an eye to business, had 
advertised the fact that "The President and 
his Lady" and "The Hero of Appomattox and 
Mrs. Grant" would be there; and, when Stan- 
ton learned of it, he tried to dissuade them, for 

198 



ABRAHAJVI LINCOLN 

the secret service had heard rumours of threat- 
ened assassination. He was so vigorous that 
he succeeded with Grant, who withdi-ew his 
acceptance of the invitation, and left for Bur- 
lington, New Jersey, to see his daughter 
Nelhe. But Lincohi laughed at Stanton. 
The party was reorganised. He took with 
him Major Rathbone, "because Stanton in- 
sists upon having some one to protect me." 
Miss Harris, the daughter of a New York 
senator, was asked, and about nine o'clock the 
party entered the presidential box at the 
theatre. The holiday mood was on him still. 
He enjoyed the performance with that keen 
rehsh the play always afforded him, and 
laughed and joked and was dehghtful. 

At twenty minutes after ten o'clock there 
was a pistol-shot. Some thought, in the mo- 
ment's flash, that it was all part of the play. 
And then two men were struggling in the 
President's box. There was the sickness of 
the confusion of tragedy, and a woman's voice 
shrieking: — 

199 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

"He has killed the President !" 

A man leaped from the box, caught his spur 
in the American flag that draped it, and then, 
rising from the stage where he had heavily 
fallen, he brandished a dagger, cried out with 
awful theatricalism, ^'Sic semper tyrannisr 
and, stalking lamely, crossed the stage and 
disappeared. Then horror and chaos in the 
theatre and in the city. 

They bore the President from the theatre, 
and some lodger, leaving a house just across 
the street, said, "Take him up to my room." 
Thither they bore him, to the lodger's bed, and 
watched all the night through. The bullet, 
entering at the back of the head, had passed 
through his brain. He never was conscious 
any more, and in the morning, at twenty-two 
minutes after seven o'clock, while the crowds 
were straining their eyes on the bulletins and 
the dawn had come after the blackest and most 
horrid night Washington had ever known, he 
died; and Stanton, at his bedside, said, — ■■ 

200 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

'*Now he belongs to the ages." 

All that night the city had been in uproar, 
drums beating the long roll, soldiers ransack- 
ing everywhere. Seward had been almost 
mortally stabbed. There were awful rumours 
that Vice-President Johnson was killed, and 
Grant and Stanton. The city shuddered with 
the fear of some vast, unknown conspiracy. 
The blow had been struck so suddenly, no effi- 
cient pursuit had been made. But, as the day 
progressed, it was learned that the plot had 
succeeded only in the President's case. Se- 
ward was desperately wounded, but could re- 
cover. The others were safe. Grant was 
hastening back from New Jersey. Johnson 
had taken the oath, and was President. 

The assassin was John Wilkes Booth, a 
melodramatic actor, one in most ways un- 
worthy of the great name he bore. He was 
a fanatic in the Southern cause, and long, it 
seemed, cherished the plot he had at last so 
successfully executed that he struck down the 

201 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

dearest life in America. At the stage door of 
the theatre he had had a horse in waiting, and 
had ridden off into Maryland. 

All over the North, that next day, the peo- 
ple were dumb with grief and rage. The il- 
luminations, the festoons, the arches, the Stars 
and Stripes with which they had decorated 
whole towns, mocked them now, and they took 
them down or hid them away under the black 
of their mourning. Men met in the street, and 
stood mute, gazing at each other with tears 
running down their cheeks, and even those who 
had hated and maligned and opposed him un- 
derstood him now in the transfiguration 
through which his last sacrifice revealed him. 
They folded the body of Abraham Lincoln in 
the flag, and bore it from that lodging-house 
in Tenth Street to the White House, and after 
that to the Capitol, where it lay in state. Then 
began that long, strange funeral procession 
homeward, when it was borne back over the 
very route he had taken in 1861 when he went 
to Washington to take up his task, with pauses 

202 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and funeral marches and lyings in state in 
city and capital. Night, storm, and rain made 
no difference to the crowds. At New York, 
when the bells tolled midnight, a German 
chorus began to sing the Integer Vitaej and, 
as the train sped through the wide country, 
little groups of farmers could be seen, dim 
figures in the night, watching it sweep by, wav- 
ing lanterns in sad farewell. 

Long before the procession ended, the as- 
sassin, at bay in a barn in Virginia, had been 
shot down by a soldier, a fanatic in the Union 
cause, Boston Corbett. But, in the face of 
Abraham Lincoln, the sweeping thousands 
that looked upon it as it was slowly borne 
homeward through the States saw forgiveness 
and peace. He was buried JNIay 4, 1865, with 
stately civil and military ceremonies, in Oak 
Ridge Cemetery at Springfield. 

His beautiful dream was not to be. 
Shrewd, logical realist though he was, never- 
theless he was essentially an idealist, and his 

203 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ideal was too high, too far. Mutual forgive- 
ness, immediate reconciliation, brotherly love, 
were not for his contemporaries, and their 
hatred bore its inevitable fruit in the bitter 
days of reconstruction that followed. Because 
they could not understand him, the men of his 
time reviled and ridiculed him, measured him 
by the standards with which they measured 
themselves, and, in judging him, judged only 
themselves. Themselves impractical, they 
thought him impractical who was the most 
practical of men; thought him ignorant who 
was the wisest of men; sneered at him as un- 
educated, — him on whom degrees and doctors' 
hoods would have appeared pinchbeck and 
ridiculous! And his fate, in hfe, in death, was 
the lonely fate — and the immortal glory of all 
the prophets and saviours of the world. As 
the scenes in the great war receded, as the per- 
spective lengthened and passions cooled, men 
came to see how great, how mighty, how orig- 
inal he was. As slowly they grew in the 

204 



ABRAHAJNI LINCOLN 

national spirit he breathed into them, as man- 
kind in its upward striving reached toward 
his stature, they began to recognise in him not 
only the first, but the ideal American, realising 
in his life all that America is and hopes and 
dreams. And more and more, as time goes 
on, he grows upon the mind of the world. The 
figure of Washington, the first of American 
heroes, has taken on the cold and classic isola- 
tion of a marble statue. But Lincoln, even 
though inevitable legend has enveloped him in 
its refracting atmosphere, remains dearly 
human, and the common man may look upon 
his sad and homely face and find in it that 
quality of character which causes him to re- 
vere and love him as a familiar friend, one of 
the common people whom, as he once humor- 
ously said, God must have loved ^'because he 
made so many of them." Thus he remains 
close to the heart, just as if he had lived on 
through the years, essentially and forever 
human, not alone the possession of our own 

205 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

people, but of all people ; not of a nation only, 
but of the whole human brotherhood he loved 
with such perfect devotion, and of that human- 
ity to which he gave his life. 



206 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The books, sketches, essays, and poems on Lin- 
coln, as was intimated in the Preface, are already 
legion. Besides, his life is written all over and 
through the history of our nation during the critical 
period to which slavery brought it. It would be 
impossible to name them all, perhaps it would be 
impracticable to read them all. Historical works 
dealing with his times and with the war, all of which 
must certainly take him into account, are therefore 
omitted, together with much else of interest. But 
the following titles have been selected as being, it is 
thought, the leading Lives and books bearing directly 
on his career. Those considered most valuable are 
marked with an asterisk. 

L * Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln 
AND Hannibal Hamlin. By William Dean 
Howells and John L. Hayes. (Columbus, Ohio, 
1860: Follett, Foster & Co.) 

11. Political Debates between Hon. Abraham 
Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the 
Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois, etc. 
(Columbus, Ohio, 1860: Follett, Foster & Co.) 
207 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

III. Life of Abraham Lincoln, etc. By Joseph 
H. Barrett. (Cincinnati, 1865: Moore, Wilstach 
& Baldwin.) 

IV. Abraham Lincoln, his Life and Public 
Services. By Phoebe A. C. Hanaford. (Boston, 
1865: B. B. Russell & Co.) 

V. The Life and Public Services of Abraham 
Lincoln, Etc. By Henry J. Raymond. (New 
York, 1865: Derby & Miller.) 

VI. The History of Abraham Lincoln and the 
Overthrow of Slavery. By Isaac N. Arnold. 
(Chicago, 1866: Clarke & Co.) 

VII. * Six Months at the White House with 
Abraham Lincoln, etc. By Francis B. Car- 
penter. (New York, 1866: Hurd & Houghton.) 

VIII. * Life of Abraham Lincoln. By J. G. 
Holland. (Springfield, Mass., 1866: C. Bill.) 

IX. * The Life of Abraham Lincoln, from his 
Birth to his Inauguration as President. By 
Ward H. Lamon. (Boston, 1872: J. R. Osgood 
&Co.) 

X. Abraham Lincoln and the Abolition of 
Slavery in the United States. By Charles G. 
Leland. (New York, 1879: G. P. Putnam's 
Sons.) 

208 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

XI. * Reminiscences of Abraham LI^xoLN by 
Distinguished Men of his Time. Edited by 
Allan Thorndike Rice. (New York, 1886: North 
American Publishing Co.) 

XII. * Abraham Lincoln, a History. By John 
C. Nicolay and John Hay. (New York, 1890: 
The Century Company.) 

XIII. * Herndon's Lincoln, the True Story of 
a Great Life, etc. By William H. Herndon and 
Jesse W. Weik. (Chicago, 1889 : Belford, Clarke 
& Co.) Same, with Emendations. (New York, 
189^: D. Appleton & Co.) 

XIV. Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, etc. 
By Henry C. Whitney. (Boston, 1892: Estes & 
I^auriat.) 

XV. * Abraham Lincoln. By John T. Morse, 
Jr. (Boston and New York, 1893: Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co.) 

XVI. * Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln. 
Edited by John C. Nicolay and John Hay. (New 
York, 1894: The Century Company.) 

XVII. Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of 
American Slavery. By Noah Brooks. (New 
York, 1894: G. P. Putnam's Sons.) 

209 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

XVIII. * Abeaham Lincoln, the Man of the 
People. By Norman Hapgood. (New York, 
1899: The Macmillan Company.) 

XIX. * The Life of Abraham Lincoln. By Ida 
M. Tarbell. (New York, 1900- The Doubleday 
&McClure Co.):;'^;]-: ^-'^ r,^.,.- .^.i.,;,.^ ec'^ 

XX. * Lincoln, the Lawyer. By Frederick 
Trevor Hill. (New York, 1906: The Century 
Company.) 

XXI. * Lincoln, Master of Men, a Study of 
Character. By Alonzo Rothschild. (Boston 
and New York, 1906: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 

XXII. * Lincoln in the Telegraph Office. 
By David Homer Bates. (New York, 1907: The 
Century Company.) 

XXIII. * Abraham Lincoln. By Henry Bryan 
Binns. (London: J. M. Dent & Co.; New York, 
1907: E. P. Dutton&Co.) 

XXIV. * The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 
1858. Volume I. of Lincoln Series; Collections 
of the Illinois State Historical Library, Vol. III. 
Edited by Edwin Erie Sparks. (Springfield, 
Illinois, 1908.) 



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